June 16, 2021 • 50 mins
We continue learning about the initialisms and acronyms used commonly in tech and what they mean. From proprietary file extensions to global navigation systems, we work our way through the technological alphabet.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech, and we are continuing
our episodes that give a sort of glossary overview of
(00:25):
some common acronyms and initialisms within tech and include a
little bit of backstory for each one. And because I'm
a chatty feller, in the first episode, we started off
with two f A or two factor authentication, and we
ended with d l C or downloadable content. So we're
gonna pick up right where we left off and continue
(00:47):
on down the alphabet. So next up is d l L.
This is Microsoft's approach to what is called a shared library,
and by that I mean that it's a file that
contain means non volatile resources that can be used by
different computer programs. Volatile in this case refers to whether
(01:07):
or not the information is changeable or or it gets
wiped out when the device is powered off. So these
libraries remain unchanged when the computer power is off, and
they are right back when the computer power is back on,
and that information persists even after the machine shuts down.
These libraries hold assets that other programs might need to
(01:28):
access in the process of, you know, the programs doing
whatever it is they're supposed to do. So, if you've
ever seen a file that has the d l L extension,
that's a dynamic link library and it means you're on
a PC that's running on Windows. Getting into more detail
would pretty much require a dedicated episode. So just think
(01:49):
of d l L files as being a resource cash
for programs running on a Windows computer. And if you've
ever had any sort of program give you an error
because it couldn't find a DLL file, that's what it's
looking for. Next is d n S or domain name system,
(02:10):
so you know how you can type in addresses in
a web browser to go to specific web pages, like
you know, YouTube dot com takes you to YouTube, and
Netflix dot com takes you to Netflix, and Facebook dot
com takes you to a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Might be tiny bit of editorializing that made its way
(02:32):
in there, My apologies. Well, anyway, d n S is
the underlying system that makes all that possible. It's this
system that acts kind of like a massive address book
for all things Internet, not just the Web, but the
web stuff is probably the easiest to explain, typically because
it's how a lot of us interact with the Internet. Now,
(02:55):
every machine on the Internet has a numerical address in
the form of an I P address. But as we
established with binary language and machine code in the previous episode,
we humans do not handle tons of numbers super well,
so it would be really hard for us to remember
specific I P addresses if we had to rely purely
(03:16):
on putting in those numerical addresses. And by the way,
that's just for I p v four addresses, which is
outdated these days. You would really need to learn I
p v six addresses. Those are even longer strings of characters,
and they include not only numbers, but some letters as well.
More on that in a later entry. So the DNS
(03:39):
establishes which domain names relate to which IP addresses, and
it makes it way easier to navigate the Internet for
those of us incapable of committing strings of seemingly random
letters and numbers to memory. There's a lot more to
be said about d n s, including the various attacks
that hackers sometimes launch against the d n s, but
(04:00):
we can save that for other episodes. Next is DOSS
or d O S. That stands for disc Operating System,
and more often than not it refers to an operating
system that was derived from IBM S personal computers. There
have been many different flavors of DOSS, which share a
few elements in common. They are text based operating systems,
(04:24):
so in other words, you navigate these by typing out
various commands in a in a prompt, and you do
that to move through directories and folders. There's no Windows,
there's no know icons to click on. You're typing these
commands out, and you also type in commands to execute
specific files, so to run a program that's stored on
a computer. Before Windows, this was how people would interact
(04:46):
with computers that had hard drive storage. Prior to that,
your average user would typically just insert a disk into
a disk drive and the computer's boot process would launch
directly into that disks associated program. Although you would actually
navigate to a disk drive and executed program that way.
That was also possible for PCs. Windows would end up
(05:08):
replacing DOSS, and on Apple computers, the Mac operating System
replaced Apple's version of DOSSDAS was a pretty lightweight operating system,
and that meant you could reserve more of your computer's
resources to store and run the programs that you wanted
to execute, and some old fogies like yours truly got
(05:29):
really salty wind. Windows came along because it demanded way
more computational resources than Doss did. So while Windows was
inarguably easier to navigate and leagues more intuitive than Doss
ever was, it also encroached on precious computational resources, and
some folks like me got grouchy about it and held
(05:50):
out for a long time until pretty much all of
the software that was out there in the world required
a Windows operating system as the foundation. Not that I'm
still bitter nearly forty years later. Next is d p I.
This stands for dots per inch and it's typically used
to refer to the resolution of printed or scanned material.
(06:14):
So with displays and screens and monitors, we talk about
resolution in terms of the number of pixels that are
on display within a full screen, right, So greater pixel
density means that you have higher resolution. So another way
to think of it is to imagine that you are
tasked with making a yellow smiley face image and you're
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given a frame that frame is one foot square, and
you're gonna make this image using wooden blocks that are
painted a single color. You're giving a bunch of yellow
blocks and a bunch of black blocks. Each of these
blocks is one inch square, so you've got a foot
by a foot, so you can fit twelve squares across
and twelve squares down and you make your little smiley
(07:00):
face image. It would be a very blocky smiley face.
But let's say you keep that same frame, so it's
one ft by one ft, But now you're given blocks
that are half an inch square, so they're half the size,
half the width, and half the length, and now you
can fit way more squares in. While it's gonna look
a little better. Maybe you go down to a quarter
(07:22):
of an inch for a square, and as those blocks
get smaller, you can fit more of them into the
same physical space, and you create smoother lines as a result,
giving your image a higher resolution. Well, the same is
true for displays and well for printers. So dots per
inch is the resolution of the number of dots of
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half tone that uh can appear per inch of paper.
Generally speaking, a higher dp I means that you get
a more clear, sharp and detailed print job. But just
like photo resolution, there is a point of diminishing returns
in which boosting that DPI number even higher might not
(08:03):
lead to a noticeable improvement. It might on paper, to
use a pun be an improvement, but you might not
be able to actually see it. It's not unusual to
have printers with a high dpi in excess of around
two thousand. Next is dr M. This is the dreaded
digital rights management. This refers to copyright holders attempting to
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control the consumption of digital media in some way. So
let's take a step back for a minute. When I
was a kid, if I had been anaird, well, which
I wasn't. I was a good kid. But let's say
that I was a rotten kid. Maybe I might go
down to the local Turtles music store in Gainesville, Georgia,
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and I decide I'm going to try and shoplift a
cassette tape of I don't know Bruce Springsteen's greatest hits.
If I had done that, well, I mean, first of all,
I would have been a thief, But on top of that,
I would have deprived that Turtles from being able to
sell that particular cassette. The store would be unable to
sell it because it's gone right, I mean, the physical
copy is in my hands. So stores had to come
(09:12):
up with various methods to discourage or prevent shoplifting. But
then skip ahead a few decades now you're in a
world with digital files, and that world is very different.
For one thing, it is way easier to make copies
of digital files than it would be with physical media.
Not that you couldn't make physical copies. We could, it
was just very time consuming and by the way, big
(09:35):
companies weren't huge fans of even that kind of copying
back in the day. So various media companies came up
with ways to limit or restrict how users could experience
and more specifically, how they could copy media. So, for example,
there might be copy protection on a file that only
allows it to be copied a certain amount of times
(09:56):
before it's lockdown, so you can only install this file
on a certain number of machines, and then after that
the code would not allow you to transfer it to
a new device. Um Or there might be DRM that
connects to the Internet where it phones home back to
whatever the I P holders system is and keeps them
(10:18):
informed about how that media is being used. The goal
of DRM is mostly to prevent piracy and to stop
the unlicensed sharing of technology, and I frequently think of
it in terms of media. That's the example that I
always go to. However, DRM can actually cover all sorts
(10:39):
of technologies beyond even digital files. That includes hardware, like
physical hardware, including stuff like tractors. So why tractors. Well,
let's say you're a company like John Dear, because John
Deer does this, and you make tractors, and you know
that somewhere down the line, people are going to need
to have those tractors repaired or have some sort of
(11:00):
maintenance done on them. By including dr M, you can
make sure that only licensed mechanics, which are people who
have paid you for the privilege of being able to
work on these types of machines. They're the only ones
who can legally repair John Dear tractors. Because the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A made it
(11:22):
illegal to try and circumvent dr M, So even if
you were a mechanically savvy farmer and you wanted to
do your own repairs, you would not be allowed to
do that legally. You would have to break the law
because you'd have to get around the DRM to do it,
or I guess you could go through the trouble to
apply and become a licensed mechanic with John Dear, but
(11:45):
I think that's probably going too far. So one of
the really big issues with DRM is that it can
have unintended consequences and make it more difficult to legally
make use of a product that you've actually purchased yourself.
So in many ways, DRM can actually end up encouraging piracy.
And that's because frequently pirates will actually work to strip
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DRM out of products. That removes all those restrictions, which
again affect not just people who are trying to steal stuff,
it affects people who have legitimately purchased things. The moral
of the story, I think is that if you make
it harder for people to use something legally, they are
far more likely to turn to illegal means to do so. Anyway,
(12:30):
dr M comes in all different forms, Some are less
obnoxious than others, and I do want to make this clear.
I get the motivation for using it. I mean, companies
make revenue off their intellectual property. They don't want to
see that go away, so it's in their best interests
to try and find ways to protect that. It's just
(12:50):
that a lot of the d r M approaches seem
to not quite achieve that goal and instead just create frustrations.
Net is DVD and I included this one because I mean,
I'm pretty sure everyone out there knows what a DVD is,
but the actual initialism used to trip me up all
the time, because I grew up in the era in
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which compact discs or c d s first debuted and
they transformed the music industry, and then DVDs came around
to do the same for the home video market and
then beyond, so the humble VHS tape eventually faded away
as a result, And I always used to think that
DVD stood for digital video disc. But that ain't it,
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or at least that's not the whole story. And I'm
sure a lot of you out there are way smarter
than I am, way more informed than I am, and
you're all shouting the real name, which is digital versatile
disc now, to be fair, at least according to some sources,
the original name was digital video disc. But at some
point the manufacturers who were putting this together figured that
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this could give people the impression that DVDs are only
good for storing video content because people can get very
narrow focused on this sort of stuff. But of course
DVDs can hold all sorts of different types of digital information,
so that was why they swapped out video for versatile
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that would replace video. Except no one really paid much
attention to that, and they just still called DVD digital
video disc or just DVD. They never bothered to call
it the full thing anyway. Light compact discs DVDs are
a type of optical storage, which means we use light
to read and write information on those discs. Companies like
(14:38):
Sony and Phillips started working on DVD technology not long
after releasing the first compact discs. So the c D
allowed for the storage of large digital files like high
quality audio files, but with a refinement, these companies knew
that they could cram even more information onto a disk.
(14:59):
So for about a decade uh two different big groups
of companies began to work on the next generation of
optical discs, and it came down to two competing formats.
So in this corna you had Sony and Phillips that
had developed a technology that they called the Multimedia c
D or m M c D, and in this corna
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you had Tashiba and Time Warner a couple of other companies,
and they had really led the development on a format
called super Density discs or s D. Seeing how two
competing formats could ultimately hurt the market. As anyone who
has been a consumer during a format war can tell you,
the group's ultimately decided that it would make way more
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sense for them to collaborate and make a common format
that combined elements of both s D and m M
c D. That is what became DVD. DVD players went
on sale in Japan in n took another year for
them to come out over in the United States. And
the DVD could really hold way more information than a
(16:04):
c D. In fact, if you had a dual layer,
double sided DVD, you can store more than ten times
the amount of information that could fit on a compact disc. Well,
we are finally through the d s. Everyone and when
we come back will jump on those ease. But I
only have a couple of them, so stay tuned. We're
gonna take a quick break, and our first e goes
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to e f F. So in technology, this stands for
the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Back in a trio of guys
decided to form a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil
liberties in the digital world. And these founders included a
programmer who was perhaps best known for his role in
(16:56):
developing the spreadsheet software Lotus one, two three. That was
Mitch Kapor. Then there's an activist and developer named John
Gilmour who worked on many different types of software, including
tons of software under the GANOW license, so more about
GNU in the future. And then there was John Perry Barlow,
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who was, among many many other things, a lyricist for
the band The Grateful Dead. Now, those three men shared
a common passion for the defense of civil liberties, and
they saw technology as being both a great enabler of
liberty as well as a potential threat to it depending
on how it's used. The inciting incident that led to
(17:39):
the formation of the e f F revolved around a
games publisher called Steve Jackson Games. And when I say
games publisher, I mean hard copy stuff like board games
and role playing games and card games, not video games
or computer games. So some famous ones include shay Geek,
which is sort of a comedy card game, or money Skin,
(18:00):
another comedy card game, This one fantasy oriented. There's Illuminati,
which is a game of various conspiracies competing against each
other in a way. And then there's girp's the Generic
Universal role Playing System and their tons of other ones.
So what does a company that makes board games and
RPGs and card games have to do with the e
(18:23):
f FF. Well, back in nine Steve Jackson had his
company headquarters in Austin, Texas, and they were raided by
the Secret Service. What all, right, now, stay with me. So,
in the late eighties, someone got hold of a proprietary
document that belonged to Bell South. They were able to
(18:45):
get hold of this and then they shared it. That
document pertained to the nine one one emergency system, and
the fear was that if hackers were able to exploit
that system, they might come up the works and thus
people who actually had to report emergencies would have no
way of doing it. So it represented sort of a
major threat. The Secret Service got involved to find out
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who was at fault, who had who was responsible, and
to to go after them, and they found that the
document had been posted on a bulletin board system or BBS. Now,
I guess I could have included BBS in our tech glossary,
but BBS is a pretty outdated term these days. It's
essentially a predecessor to the kind of stuff you would
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see with the Internet, where someone would have special software
that would allow other people to dial into their computer
so their computer could host all sorts of stuff like
message boards and games and files and that kind of thing.
People could dial into that computer or BBS and access
those things anyway. The guy who ran this particular BBS,
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but again not necessarily the actual person responsible for posting
the file there, was an employee of Steve Jackson Game.
So the Secret Service decided they would seize all of
this guy's computers, but they would also seize all of
the computers of his employer to make certain that this
proprietary document wasn't getting spread around. This was a crushing
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blow to Steve Jackson Games and Steve Jackson himself. His
company just couldn't conduct business while the computers were in
Secret Service custody, and eventually Steve Jackson Games got their
computers back, but it was clear that the Secret Service
had really combed through the internal emails inside the company,
and Steve Jackson wanted to pursue civil action against the
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Secret Service for damages and wanted to lean on a
civil rights organization to help with that lawsuit, but there
really wasn't such any organization in existence that would really
fit the bill. That's what precipitated the formation of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Today, the e f F helps in
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similar legal cases that revolve around civil liberties and technology.
The e f F sometimes helps fund lawsuits or supplies
expertise in technical and digital matters, and the organization isn't
without critics. There's some people who argue that the e
f F has really helped tech companies kind of entrenched
themselves and protect themselves against regulation and other matters that
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maybe didn't lead to the right outcome. But you know,
it's it's kind of like anything with humans. There's stuff
that is good and stuff that's not so good. Next,
we have e O L. So in the movie Tron,
e O L was the Master Control programs way of
ending a line of communication. I mean it literally meant
end of line. There's the end of Line club in
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the Tron Legacy film. But in this case, I actually
mean e O L as end of life, meaning the
stage of a products life cycle. In which it's just
gonna get worse from here on out. So, for example,
let's take Windows XP, which is a very or was
a very popular operating system. There's still people out there
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who are using it today, despite the fact that it's
sadly outdated. Microsoft released Windows XP way back in two
thousand one, and that system dominated the market share for
operating systems on personal computers at the time. And while
Microsoft would release the successor to Windows XP in two
thousand and seven, it actually continued to release service packs
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for Windows XP up through two thousand eight, and even
provided extended support until two thousand fourteen. But by then
Microsoft was really pushing people to please, for the love
of technology, update to a more recent operating system. Companies
can't continue to support old software indefinitely and still dedicate
resources to making new stuff. Plus, fewer pieces of current
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software were actually compatible with this older Windows operating system,
and so really, by two thousand eight, Windows XP was
entering its e o L phase. Microsoft would stop updating
it and the product would grow increasingly obsolete over time.
Another example of e o L is easy to see
with smartphones. Smartphones depend upon the interaction of hardware, that
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being the actual smartphone mobile device and software that being
the operating system for that device, on top of which
all the apps live. So with Apple, we are now
on IO S Sport Team, and the oldest iPhone capable
of running that version of iOS is the iPhone six S.
That one is the one that originally launched in two
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thousand fifteen. Older iPhones before the success, even if they
are still operational, are firmly in the e o L
phase because they can no longer keep pace with the
latest operating systems, which means fewer apps are going to
run on them and they will become increasingly useless as
time goes on. For companies, e OL might arrive much
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earlier than for customers, so a company will end sales
and marketing effort around a product that it designates as
being in e o L. Essentially, the company says, we're
no longer going to sell this stuff. We're going to
sell the next version of this or you know, some
improved version of this, and they focus on that instead.
So they say we're done dedicating resources to supporting this
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so that we can sell more stuff, more new stuff.
So a company could actually start stop selling a product
but continue supporting it for a while longer. In the
case of Microsoft, for example, they stopped selling XP long
before they stopped actually providing support for it. Next is
fact f a Q. I included this one even though
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I think probably everyone listening to this already knows it.
It of course stands for frequently asked questions. Anyone who
has ever served as a point of contact for any
organization knows that of the time, you're answering the same
basic questions repeatedly throughout the day. So one way to
address that is to create a fact and that has
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those basic answers already in there, so people can see
them right off the bat. So when people use the fact,
it frees up the time of the person who otherwise
would have to respond, and you know, it just makes
it easier to find answers. In general, the term fact
actually predates the web, possibly emerging from the electronic mailing
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lists and Usenet groups in the nineteen eighties. Next, we
have f c C. This stands for the Federal Communications Commission,
part of the United States government. It's easiest for me
to just quote the f CC's website to describe what
it does. So here it is quote The Federal Communications
Commission regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite,
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and cable in all fifty states, the District of Columbia,
and US territories. An independent US government agency overseen by Congress,
the Commission is the federal agency responsible for implementing and
enforcing America's communications laws and regulations. So that organization formed
after the passing of the Communications Act of nineteen thirty four,
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and it has helped shape the landscape of technology quite
a bit in the United States, sometimes for the better
and sometimes not. The FCC is supposed to promote competition
between various communications companies while also encouraging innovation and investment
in services so that people get access to stuff like
broadband connectivity. But a quick look at the telecommunications landscape
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in America tells you that for a lot of folks,
the whole competition thing really isn't a thing. It's not
that prominent. I mean, over the years, through various mergers
and acquisitions, we've seen many regions get carved out by
one or maybe two telecommunications companies. And I don't know
what it's like where you live, however, at my home,
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because I checked it this morning, just to make sure.
We only have one telecommunications provider that offers connectivity at
high speed needs at my place, and even that isn't fiber.
I don't get fiber connectivity where I live. And I
live in the city of Atlanta, y'all. I mean, I'm
not in like the sticks or something. I'm in the
(27:12):
city limits. But enough about me griping about my personal
lack of connectivity. The FCC has also played an inconsistent
role in terms of ensuring net neutrality in the United States.
The concept of net neutrality includes a lot of stuff,
but one of the big ones is all content should
be treated equally across all service providers. So, in other words,
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if there's a company that's both an I s P
and a content company, that I s P should not
prioritize its own traffic over that from other content providers.
There's a lot more to it than that. Net neutrality
is a very big topic, and during certain political administrations,
the FCC has pushed to create rules and policies that
(27:57):
strengthen net neutrality, such as under the Obama administration, while
in others the FCC has largely dismantled those same systems,
such as during Trump's presidency fun times. And the reason
for that change, by the way, is that the leadership
of the f c C comes by appointment by whomever
is president at that time, and so as presidential administrations change,
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so too does the f c C. Anyway, you'll hear
a lot about the FCC being involved in various tech
related issues here in the United States. Next up flops. Now,
this doesn't just describe that one stage play I was
in back in two thousand two. Now, this is an
acronym that stands for floating point operations per second. So
(28:43):
if you remember when I talked about c p U
s in the previous episode, I mentioned that we measure
their performance in part by clock cycles, which is kind
of like how many instructions the CPU can execute per second.
But there's another way to measure computer perform mormants, and
that's in how many floating point operations it can handle
per second. So what is a floating point Well, you
(29:07):
can think of it as being similar to scientific note notation,
So you know, really big or really small numbers are
difficult to handle, even for computers, especially computers that have
to handle both at the same time. A computer has
a limit to how many digits it can hold at
any given moment. So floating points are a way to
indicate very large or very small numbers and makes them
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much easier to handle and process. When we talk about supercomputers,
we typically refer to the number of flops those computers
can handle. The fastest supercomputer by this metric today is
the Fugaku, which is incredible. It's set an insane record
of four hundred forty two headah flops using the HPL
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computer benchmark. It's a way of testing how many floating
operations are floating point operations I should say a computer
can complete in a second. So in the tech world, uh,
what does peda flop mean? Well, we use the word
kilo or the prefix kilo for thousand, we use mega
for a million, Giga for billion, terra for trillion, and
(30:12):
petta is for quadrillion, which means the Fugaku supercomputer reached
four hundred forty two quadrillion floating point operations per second
against this particular benchmark, which is pretty astounding, right. But
according to Tech Republic, Fugaku was also able to achieve
two point oh exa flops against the benchmark of high
(30:33):
performance computing Artificial intelligence workload or hpc AI another benchmark test.
So an exa flop is one quintillion flops. It's even
more like it's just the sucker is fast, is what
I'm saying. But typically when we're talking about flops, we're
talking about high performance compute. We're not talking about you know,
(30:56):
your standard laptop. Next is FPS. This one's actually tricky
because there are a few different FPS initialisms, and some
of them can actually apply to the same stuff but
in different ways. So, for example, in the world of
video games, you can have FPS, meaning a first person shooter,
which is a type of game in which your perspective
(31:16):
is from the first person point of view and you
run around, you know, shooting stuff. But FPS can also
stand for frames per second, as in the number of
rendered frames presented to a viewer each second, and this
version of FPS can apply to all sorts of games,
including first person shooter games, So you can talk about
(31:38):
the FPS for an FPS, which is a lot of fun.
Right anyway, frames per second is important for creating a
smooth video experience. So our vision tricks us if we
see a series of similar images and they're presented to
us in quick succession. We experienced this as if we're
watching something that's actually in motion, that the image itself
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is moving. That's the whole basic foundation for film and
for animation. So with a classic film like something that's
actually on film itself, we watched the playback of images
at a rate of twenty four frames per second. That's
fast enough to make it seem as though we're watching
moving images, but in fact, if you just stop the projector,
you would see you're just looking at a series of photographs. Well,
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in the digital world, fps is important too, and a
higher FPS typically means a better experience for the viewer,
particularly with video games. Higher FPS can help a gamer
make better choices while playing and time things out just right,
picking up on details that they might miss if they
had a lower FPS. But just as we saw with resolution,
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there's a law of diminishing returns at play here, so
once you get over a certain FPS, which varies from
person to person, the benefits become less obvious as they
crank up. There are other fps is within the tech
world to like fast packet switching that refers to how
certain systems handled data transmissions across the system, but there's
(33:05):
no need to jump into all that here, All right,
I got a couple more f's to get through after
this break, so stick around for f's sake. Next up,
we got the f t C, and we're back to
(33:25):
another U. S government agency similar to what we talked
about with f c C, but the f t C
stands for the Federal Trade Commission. So while the f
c C specifically focuses on laws and regulations that relate
to communications, which includes telecommunications and the Internet and radio
and etcetera, the f t C is primarily focused on
(33:46):
enforcing antitrust laws and protecting consumers in the United States.
So in this case, the word trust refers to an
entity or sometimes a small group of entities that dominates
an industry and uses areas means to maintain that dominance
by keeping other companies from being able to compete. So
(34:06):
that can include stuff like fixing prices to undercut smaller competitors,
and these smaller competitors might not have the financial ability
to survive and they're effectively starved out because the dominant
company could sell stuff at a loss and just endure
that loss while waiting for the other businesses to die,
(34:26):
and at that point the company can then drive prices
way up because there's no competition for consumers to turn to.
So the FTC gets involved in a lot of the
tech world because we see some massive consolidations going on
within the space, whether it's Facebook gobbling up another social platform,
or Amazon buying up another marketplace, either real world or online,
(34:49):
or Google buying up pretty much everything in sight. The
FTC plays apart in making certain that companies are playing
by the rules, and like the f c C, this
isn't always you know, apparent, but then I guess it
all depends on how you interpret what the rules actually are.
On the consumer protection side, the FTC is also the
(35:11):
agency responsible for enforcing stuff like KAPPA, the Children's Online
Privacy Protection Act that we recently talked about. Because KAPPA
mostly relates to how companies collect and use children's information
by using the Internet, you might be tempted to think
that it's the f c C that would be in charge,
but that's just not the case. So it can get
(35:31):
a bit confusing when you're talking about the f c
C versus the f TC, and I sometimes mix up
the two myself. I've been guilty of it. The FTC, however,
is also older than the f c C. It traces
its history all the way back to nineteen fourteen. Moving
on f TP. You down with f TP, Yeah, you
(35:52):
know me? All right, I'm kind of dating myself here.
I'm actually very curious if producer Tari even recognized is
that reference? Okay? So, f t P stands for File
Transfer Protocol, and a protocol is just a set of
rules or instructions. So from a high level, this is
the set of rules that the guide how you transfer
(36:16):
files across networks. And when I say you, I really
mean how systems transfer files from one machine to another
across a network. It's one of the underlying technologies for
the Internet, with others being things like email and the
World Wide Web and stuff like that. FTP is also
one of the older protocols with regard to the Internet.
(36:38):
It was first outlined back in ninete. And that's it
for the f Alright, let's move on to g and
first up, we've got g d p R and we
start off with a biggie. This stands for General Data
Protection Regulation and it refers to a regulation in in
law in the European Union, and it concerns itself with
(37:01):
the privacy and data protection of EU citizens. So in
the EU member countries drafted out rules to protect privacy
and personal information and gave EU citizens more of a
say in how their data could be collected and used.
G d PR puts the onus on companies to follow
these rules or potentially face huge fines. Over in the
(37:25):
United States, the explosive growth of the Internet far outpaced
privacy laws, which in the US of been fairly lucy
goosey like there's only a few privacy laws or like
outright privacy laws in the United States. So as a result,
these companies that were web based had established some pretty
(37:46):
aggressive strategies when it comes to collecting, using, and sharing
personal information. In fact, there's an entire industry based around
establishing huge databases of personal info and then charging other
companies to access those databases. Our information are. Personal info
is the currency of much of modern technology. While the
(38:07):
member states of the EU wanted to create rules to
restrict how companies could do this with EU citizens, so
they wouldn't be given free regin to collect and exploit data.
They would actually need to follow specific rules, which includes
alerting users to any points of data collection, as well
as to declare how and why that data will be used.
(38:28):
The restrictions meant that companies had to change how they
handled information, and that in itself became a kind of
micro industry. We had a lot of consultants that worked
with tech companies to make certain that their policies and
processes were compliant with g d p R, because otherwise
things could get super expensive, really fast. They also tend
(38:51):
to involve some pretty negative press. If a company is
found to have violated g DPR, it's not a good look.
The passing of g d p R effectively since shock
waves through the tech industry, which at that point really
wasn't used to governments getting that proactive in the protection
of citizen data, and g DPR has gone on to
inspire some places, like the state of California, to draft
(39:14):
privacy acts that essentially use g DPR as the basis
for that law. There are some exemptions to g d
p R, though, for example, law enforcement is not required
to abide by g DPR, and in matters of national security,
g DPR does not apply. G DPR has also changed
a bit since passing. Originally, there was this concept called
(39:37):
the right to be forgotten, which generally meant that an
EU citizen would have the right to request that their
personal information be deleted from any online sources, including stuff
like online search engines. But critics pointed out that this
policy was flawed. So let's say that we've got a
case where a public figure does something truly terrible, newsworthy
(39:59):
and terrible, like they've committed a crime of some sort. Uh,
if that person were to then follow this this process,
they might be able to demand that all mention of
that crime get a race from the internet, which you
could argue as against the public good. So these days,
the right to be forgotten is now known as the
(40:22):
right of a racer. And uh, it's not the band
eraser I tried to discover a little something to make
me sweeter. No, it's a it's it's a process that's
a little more limited. It cannot go nearly as far
as the right to be forgotten. And uh, it includes
stuff like you have to put in the request of
(40:43):
a ratier within a certain amount of time from publication
or else you missed the boat. Also, there's the consideration
about whether or not removing the information would represent a
public harm, or if it would be more harmful to
the individual if that information were to remain up. There
are a lot of different parts to it. In other words,
next up is Gift, and this is one of our
(41:07):
more contentious entries on this list. So obviously I still
pronounce g I F as GIF. I do not pronounce
it as jeff. The initialism stands for Graphics Interchange Format
and it's a subtype of bitmap image formats. The online
service provider compu Serve developed the GIFT file format in
(41:30):
the nineteen eighties, led by developer Steve will Hit. Now
Steve Wilhit pronounces it Jeff and that therefore he's wrong,
which I'm joking. I'm not. He's not really wrong. In fact,
the various dictionaries say that both pronunciations are acceptable, but
I mean, come on. The G stands for graphic, not giraffic. Anyway,
(41:54):
will Heights team was looking for a way to create
image files that didn't take up an enormous amount of
file space. So this was before the Worldwide Web, but
people were using online service providers and bulletin boards and
they wanted a way of being able to share images
or to download images, and the Gift team created a
(42:15):
format that limited color selection to two fifty six colors,
which helped keep file sizes down, and they used a
compression algorithm to kind of squitch these file sizes down,
and the gift was born. The compression algorithm identifies repeating
patterns within an image and then takes those patterns and
simplifies them for the purposes of expressing them within the file.
(42:36):
So this means that let's say you've got an image
that has a lot of, you know, a particular shade
of blue in one section, the file can essentially say, hey,
over here, in this part defined by these parameters, all
of that is just blue, rather than laying out that
each blue pixel is individually in each position. Now I
am oversimplifying here, but that from a high level is
(42:58):
kind of what was going on on. By stringing together
a sequence of gifts, it's possible to have them play
in a loop, and thus we get the animated gift.
Though many of the animated gifts we see today are
actually small video files that just kind of you know,
they use code to make them behave in a way
that we think of as animated gifts. But it turns
(43:20):
out that the video coding technology has actually outpaced gift code,
so we tend to see small video files rather than
actual gifts. However, the gift name has stuck around, even
though it's not necessarily a gift file extension. Next up
is GPS. This stands for Global Positioning System. Often we
(43:41):
refer to a device, like, you know, something that we
use in a car, as a GPS, by which we
mean a navigational device that relies upon this Global positioning
system to calculate that devices position relative to the surface
of the Earth. That's a wordy way of saying that
the devices using information from satellites to figure out where
(44:02):
the heck it is. Back in the nineteen seventies, the
Department of Defense in the United States began working on
what would become the GPS, and it would take a
couple of decades to complete it. But by the early
nineteen nineties, the full complement of twenty four satellites that
were part of this original plan were up in orbit,
(44:22):
and they were needed so that you could get global
coverage for GPS. Otherwise, before that, you know, coverage was
sporadic based upon whether or not you had the appropriate
number of satellites within range of you in orbit. Now
these satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth,
so in other words, they're not remaining in a fixed
(44:43):
position relative to a point on the Earth's surface, so
they are in an orbit that's at a different rate
than the Earth's rotation, also a different trajectory than Earth's rotation,
and that's why you need to have multiple satellites, like
twenty four of them to maintain constant coverage, because satellites
pass out of range at certain points and other satellites
(45:06):
will come into range. That's why you need that many
up there. The satellites send out signals that receivers on Earth,
like the one in your car can pick up, or
the one on your phone for that matter, And each
signal sent by a satellite contains some information that it's
really important. One of it those pieces of information is
a precise time stamp that says exactly when the satellite
(45:29):
broadcast that that signal, and also there's some data that
indicates that particular satellites orbital location. So the receiver has
to pick up signals from at least three satellites to
get a physical location. Because of the time stamp, the
receiver quote unquote knows how long that signal had traveled
(45:49):
from the satellite to the receiver. The receiver has to
compare this against its own time reading, typically from an
atomic clock. But more on that in the second Now,
this means that the receiver knows how far away it
is from the satellite, because the satellite communication travels at
the speed of light. So you just take the amount
of time it took for the signal to go from
(46:11):
when it was broadcast to when it was picked up
by the receiver, and you use that to figure out
how many miles it traveled in that span of time
because it was traveling at the speed of light. So
then you could draw a sphere around the satellite, like
a virtual sphere, that represents all the points that are
that distance away from the satellite in every single direction. Now,
(46:32):
granted you're only interested in the points that make an
intersection with the Earth, but there will be a lot
of those. So then you want to compare that with
other satellites. You need at least three, and then you're
looking at the intersection of where these different spheres meet,
and with three satellites you get two points where the
(46:53):
spheres will all intersect. One of those two points will
definitely be on the surface of Earth. The other one
may or may not be. So, then by looking at
the point that's actually on the surface of the Earth,
the receiver says, Okay, now I know where I am
because I'm able to tell by the distance I am
from these three different satellites. It's really really neat um.
(47:16):
It's it's kind of similar to um triangulation, but not
exactly the same. Anyway, with four satellites, you can actually
eliminate the need for the receiver to have access to
its own atomic clock to make certain to correct for errors.
And there's a lot more to it than that. For example,
until the nineteen nineties, within the US, civilian use of
(47:37):
GPS was really limited because GPS was meant for military use,
so civilian receivers they existed, but they also purposefully introduced
errors into the display, so you could not use a
GPS to get a specific reading of your location. You
can get kind of a general reading, so you wouldn't
(47:57):
be able to use it to do stuff like make
turn I turned directions in real time because your receiver's
location readoubt could be off by several hundred feet, so
it could be like turn left, you're gonna turn left
either in a hundred feet or it might be three
feet behind you, so not very useful. But then later
(48:17):
on President Clinton lifted that restriction, and since then we've
been able to use GPS receivers to help us get
to where we're going. Or you know, if you're using
Apple Maps, you can use it to drive into a river.
I'm kidding. I'm just using a very outdated joke about
the reliability of Apple Maps, which obviously has improved significantly
(48:38):
since it first launched, so it's an unfair joke for
me to make. These days, there are more than thirty
five GPS satellites out in orbit, and the technology also
is a great way to explore the concepts of general
and special relativity, because you have to have an understanding
of both of those things in order to correct for
the issues of time dilation. But that's a complicate, aided
(49:00):
subject for another time. In fact, I have covered that
in past episodes, so check that out if you want
to learn how it is that GPS proves that Einstein
was right. It's pretty fascinating stuff, all right, And that's
it for this episode. We're gonna leave off here. We're
gonna pick back up in our next one to continue
(49:21):
our glossary that will be next week, starting on Monday,
and we'll continue to work our way through these various
acronyms and initialisms to kind of demystify the world of tech,
which gets very reliant on jargon and acronyms and stuff
to the point where it can feel kind of like
it's excluding others on purpose. And I don't dig that.
I like to be inclusive, so we're gonna keep on going.
(49:42):
In the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics I
should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out
to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter.
The handle we use is tech Stuff hs W and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
(50:05):
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech, and we are continuing
our episodes that give a sort of glossary overview of
(00:25):
some common acronyms and initialisms within tech and include a
little bit of backstory for each one. And because I'm
a chatty feller, in the first episode, we started off
with two f A or two factor authentication, and we
ended with d l C or downloadable content. So we're
gonna pick up right where we left off and continue
(00:47):
on down the alphabet. So next up is d l L.
This is Microsoft's approach to what is called a shared library,
and by that I mean that it's a file that
contain means non volatile resources that can be used by
different computer programs. Volatile in this case refers to whether
(01:07):
or not the information is changeable or or it gets
wiped out when the device is powered off. So these
libraries remain unchanged when the computer power is off, and
they are right back when the computer power is back on,
and that information persists even after the machine shuts down.
These libraries hold assets that other programs might need to
(01:28):
access in the process of, you know, the programs doing
whatever it is they're supposed to do. So, if you've
ever seen a file that has the d l L extension,
that's a dynamic link library and it means you're on
a PC that's running on Windows. Getting into more detail
would pretty much require a dedicated episode. So just think
(01:49):
of d l L files as being a resource cash
for programs running on a Windows computer. And if you've
ever had any sort of program give you an error
because it couldn't find a DLL file, that's what it's
looking for. Next is d n S or domain name system,
(02:10):
so you know how you can type in addresses in
a web browser to go to specific web pages, like
you know, YouTube dot com takes you to YouTube, and
Netflix dot com takes you to Netflix, and Facebook dot
com takes you to a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Might be tiny bit of editorializing that made its way
(02:32):
in there, My apologies. Well, anyway, d n S is
the underlying system that makes all that possible. It's this
system that acts kind of like a massive address book
for all things Internet, not just the Web, but the
web stuff is probably the easiest to explain, typically because
it's how a lot of us interact with the Internet. Now,
(02:55):
every machine on the Internet has a numerical address in
the form of an I P address. But as we
established with binary language and machine code in the previous episode,
we humans do not handle tons of numbers super well,
so it would be really hard for us to remember
specific I P addresses if we had to rely purely
(03:16):
on putting in those numerical addresses. And by the way,
that's just for I p v four addresses, which is
outdated these days. You would really need to learn I
p v six addresses. Those are even longer strings of characters,
and they include not only numbers, but some letters as well.
More on that in a later entry. So the DNS
(03:39):
establishes which domain names relate to which IP addresses, and
it makes it way easier to navigate the Internet for
those of us incapable of committing strings of seemingly random
letters and numbers to memory. There's a lot more to
be said about d n s, including the various attacks
that hackers sometimes launch against the d n s, but
(04:00):
we can save that for other episodes. Next is DOSS
or d O S. That stands for disc Operating System,
and more often than not it refers to an operating
system that was derived from IBM S personal computers. There
have been many different flavors of DOSS, which share a
few elements in common. They are text based operating systems,
(04:24):
so in other words, you navigate these by typing out
various commands in a in a prompt, and you do
that to move through directories and folders. There's no Windows,
there's no know icons to click on. You're typing these
commands out, and you also type in commands to execute
specific files, so to run a program that's stored on
a computer. Before Windows, this was how people would interact
(04:46):
with computers that had hard drive storage. Prior to that,
your average user would typically just insert a disk into
a disk drive and the computer's boot process would launch
directly into that disks associated program. Although you would actually
navigate to a disk drive and executed program that way.
That was also possible for PCs. Windows would end up
(05:08):
replacing DOSS, and on Apple computers, the Mac operating System
replaced Apple's version of DOSSDAS was a pretty lightweight operating system,
and that meant you could reserve more of your computer's
resources to store and run the programs that you wanted
to execute, and some old fogies like yours truly got
(05:29):
really salty wind. Windows came along because it demanded way
more computational resources than Doss did. So while Windows was
inarguably easier to navigate and leagues more intuitive than Doss
ever was, it also encroached on precious computational resources, and
some folks like me got grouchy about it and held
(05:50):
out for a long time until pretty much all of
the software that was out there in the world required
a Windows operating system as the foundation. Not that I'm
still bitter nearly forty years later. Next is d p I.
This stands for dots per inch and it's typically used
to refer to the resolution of printed or scanned material.
(06:14):
So with displays and screens and monitors, we talk about
resolution in terms of the number of pixels that are
on display within a full screen, right, So greater pixel
density means that you have higher resolution. So another way
to think of it is to imagine that you are
tasked with making a yellow smiley face image and you're
(06:37):
given a frame that frame is one foot square, and
you're gonna make this image using wooden blocks that are
painted a single color. You're giving a bunch of yellow
blocks and a bunch of black blocks. Each of these
blocks is one inch square, so you've got a foot
by a foot, so you can fit twelve squares across
and twelve squares down and you make your little smiley
(07:00):
face image. It would be a very blocky smiley face.
But let's say you keep that same frame, so it's
one ft by one ft, But now you're given blocks
that are half an inch square, so they're half the size,
half the width, and half the length, and now you
can fit way more squares in. While it's gonna look
a little better. Maybe you go down to a quarter
(07:22):
of an inch for a square, and as those blocks
get smaller, you can fit more of them into the
same physical space, and you create smoother lines as a result,
giving your image a higher resolution. Well, the same is
true for displays and well for printers. So dots per
inch is the resolution of the number of dots of
(07:43):
half tone that uh can appear per inch of paper.
Generally speaking, a higher dp I means that you get
a more clear, sharp and detailed print job. But just
like photo resolution, there is a point of diminishing returns
in which boosting that DPI number even higher might not
(08:03):
lead to a noticeable improvement. It might on paper, to
use a pun be an improvement, but you might not
be able to actually see it. It's not unusual to
have printers with a high dpi in excess of around
two thousand. Next is dr M. This is the dreaded
digital rights management. This refers to copyright holders attempting to
(08:27):
control the consumption of digital media in some way. So
let's take a step back for a minute. When I
was a kid, if I had been anaird, well, which
I wasn't. I was a good kid. But let's say
that I was a rotten kid. Maybe I might go
down to the local Turtles music store in Gainesville, Georgia,
(08:49):
and I decide I'm going to try and shoplift a
cassette tape of I don't know Bruce Springsteen's greatest hits.
If I had done that, well, I mean, first of all,
I would have been a thief, But on top of that,
I would have deprived that Turtles from being able to
sell that particular cassette. The store would be unable to
sell it because it's gone right, I mean, the physical
copy is in my hands. So stores had to come
(09:12):
up with various methods to discourage or prevent shoplifting. But
then skip ahead a few decades now you're in a
world with digital files, and that world is very different.
For one thing, it is way easier to make copies
of digital files than it would be with physical media.
Not that you couldn't make physical copies. We could, it
was just very time consuming and by the way, big
(09:35):
companies weren't huge fans of even that kind of copying
back in the day. So various media companies came up
with ways to limit or restrict how users could experience
and more specifically, how they could copy media. So, for example,
there might be copy protection on a file that only
allows it to be copied a certain amount of times
(09:56):
before it's lockdown, so you can only install this file
on a certain number of machines, and then after that
the code would not allow you to transfer it to
a new device. Um Or there might be DRM that
connects to the Internet where it phones home back to
whatever the I P holders system is and keeps them
(10:18):
informed about how that media is being used. The goal
of DRM is mostly to prevent piracy and to stop
the unlicensed sharing of technology, and I frequently think of
it in terms of media. That's the example that I
always go to. However, DRM can actually cover all sorts
(10:39):
of technologies beyond even digital files. That includes hardware, like
physical hardware, including stuff like tractors. So why tractors. Well,
let's say you're a company like John Dear, because John
Deer does this, and you make tractors, and you know
that somewhere down the line, people are going to need
to have those tractors repaired or have some sort of
(11:00):
maintenance done on them. By including dr M, you can
make sure that only licensed mechanics, which are people who
have paid you for the privilege of being able to
work on these types of machines. They're the only ones
who can legally repair John Dear tractors. Because the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A made it
(11:22):
illegal to try and circumvent dr M, So even if
you were a mechanically savvy farmer and you wanted to
do your own repairs, you would not be allowed to
do that legally. You would have to break the law
because you'd have to get around the DRM to do it,
or I guess you could go through the trouble to
apply and become a licensed mechanic with John Dear, but
(11:45):
I think that's probably going too far. So one of
the really big issues with DRM is that it can
have unintended consequences and make it more difficult to legally
make use of a product that you've actually purchased yourself.
So in many ways, DRM can actually end up encouraging piracy.
And that's because frequently pirates will actually work to strip
(12:09):
DRM out of products. That removes all those restrictions, which
again affect not just people who are trying to steal stuff,
it affects people who have legitimately purchased things. The moral
of the story, I think is that if you make
it harder for people to use something legally, they are
far more likely to turn to illegal means to do so. Anyway,
(12:30):
dr M comes in all different forms, Some are less
obnoxious than others, and I do want to make this clear.
I get the motivation for using it. I mean, companies
make revenue off their intellectual property. They don't want to
see that go away, so it's in their best interests
to try and find ways to protect that. It's just
(12:50):
that a lot of the d r M approaches seem
to not quite achieve that goal and instead just create frustrations.
Net is DVD and I included this one because I mean,
I'm pretty sure everyone out there knows what a DVD is,
but the actual initialism used to trip me up all
the time, because I grew up in the era in
(13:11):
which compact discs or c d s first debuted and
they transformed the music industry, and then DVDs came around
to do the same for the home video market and
then beyond, so the humble VHS tape eventually faded away
as a result, And I always used to think that
DVD stood for digital video disc. But that ain't it,
(13:34):
or at least that's not the whole story. And I'm
sure a lot of you out there are way smarter
than I am, way more informed than I am, and
you're all shouting the real name, which is digital versatile
disc now, to be fair, at least according to some sources,
the original name was digital video disc. But at some
point the manufacturers who were putting this together figured that
(13:56):
this could give people the impression that DVDs are only
good for storing video content because people can get very
narrow focused on this sort of stuff. But of course
DVDs can hold all sorts of different types of digital information,
so that was why they swapped out video for versatile
(14:17):
that would replace video. Except no one really paid much
attention to that, and they just still called DVD digital
video disc or just DVD. They never bothered to call
it the full thing anyway. Light compact discs DVDs are
a type of optical storage, which means we use light
to read and write information on those discs. Companies like
(14:38):
Sony and Phillips started working on DVD technology not long
after releasing the first compact discs. So the c D
allowed for the storage of large digital files like high
quality audio files, but with a refinement, these companies knew
that they could cram even more information onto a disk.
(14:59):
So for about a decade uh two different big groups
of companies began to work on the next generation of
optical discs, and it came down to two competing formats.
So in this corna you had Sony and Phillips that
had developed a technology that they called the Multimedia c
D or m M c D, and in this corna
(15:21):
you had Tashiba and Time Warner a couple of other companies,
and they had really led the development on a format
called super Density discs or s D. Seeing how two
competing formats could ultimately hurt the market. As anyone who
has been a consumer during a format war can tell you,
the group's ultimately decided that it would make way more
(15:42):
sense for them to collaborate and make a common format
that combined elements of both s D and m M
c D. That is what became DVD. DVD players went
on sale in Japan in n took another year for
them to come out over in the United States. And
the DVD could really hold way more information than a
(16:04):
c D. In fact, if you had a dual layer,
double sided DVD, you can store more than ten times
the amount of information that could fit on a compact disc. Well,
we are finally through the d s. Everyone and when
we come back will jump on those ease. But I
only have a couple of them, so stay tuned. We're
gonna take a quick break, and our first e goes
(16:35):
to e f F. So in technology, this stands for
the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Back in a trio of guys
decided to form a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil
liberties in the digital world. And these founders included a
programmer who was perhaps best known for his role in
(16:56):
developing the spreadsheet software Lotus one, two three. That was
Mitch Kapor. Then there's an activist and developer named John
Gilmour who worked on many different types of software, including
tons of software under the GANOW license, so more about
GNU in the future. And then there was John Perry Barlow,
(17:17):
who was, among many many other things, a lyricist for
the band The Grateful Dead. Now, those three men shared
a common passion for the defense of civil liberties, and
they saw technology as being both a great enabler of
liberty as well as a potential threat to it depending
on how it's used. The inciting incident that led to
(17:39):
the formation of the e f F revolved around a
games publisher called Steve Jackson Games. And when I say
games publisher, I mean hard copy stuff like board games
and role playing games and card games, not video games
or computer games. So some famous ones include shay Geek,
which is sort of a comedy card game, or money Skin,
(18:00):
another comedy card game, This one fantasy oriented. There's Illuminati,
which is a game of various conspiracies competing against each
other in a way. And then there's girp's the Generic
Universal role Playing System and their tons of other ones.
So what does a company that makes board games and
RPGs and card games have to do with the e
(18:23):
f FF. Well, back in nine Steve Jackson had his
company headquarters in Austin, Texas, and they were raided by
the Secret Service. What all, right, now, stay with me. So,
in the late eighties, someone got hold of a proprietary
document that belonged to Bell South. They were able to
(18:45):
get hold of this and then they shared it. That
document pertained to the nine one one emergency system, and
the fear was that if hackers were able to exploit
that system, they might come up the works and thus
people who actually had to report emergencies would have no
way of doing it. So it represented sort of a
major threat. The Secret Service got involved to find out
(19:08):
who was at fault, who had who was responsible, and
to to go after them, and they found that the
document had been posted on a bulletin board system or BBS. Now,
I guess I could have included BBS in our tech glossary,
but BBS is a pretty outdated term these days. It's
essentially a predecessor to the kind of stuff you would
(19:31):
see with the Internet, where someone would have special software
that would allow other people to dial into their computer
so their computer could host all sorts of stuff like
message boards and games and files and that kind of thing.
People could dial into that computer or BBS and access
those things anyway. The guy who ran this particular BBS,
(19:52):
but again not necessarily the actual person responsible for posting
the file there, was an employee of Steve Jackson Game.
So the Secret Service decided they would seize all of
this guy's computers, but they would also seize all of
the computers of his employer to make certain that this
proprietary document wasn't getting spread around. This was a crushing
(20:15):
blow to Steve Jackson Games and Steve Jackson himself. His
company just couldn't conduct business while the computers were in
Secret Service custody, and eventually Steve Jackson Games got their
computers back, but it was clear that the Secret Service
had really combed through the internal emails inside the company,
and Steve Jackson wanted to pursue civil action against the
(20:36):
Secret Service for damages and wanted to lean on a
civil rights organization to help with that lawsuit, but there
really wasn't such any organization in existence that would really
fit the bill. That's what precipitated the formation of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Today, the e f F helps in
(20:58):
similar legal cases that revolve around civil liberties and technology.
The e f F sometimes helps fund lawsuits or supplies
expertise in technical and digital matters, and the organization isn't
without critics. There's some people who argue that the e
f F has really helped tech companies kind of entrenched
themselves and protect themselves against regulation and other matters that
(21:24):
maybe didn't lead to the right outcome. But you know,
it's it's kind of like anything with humans. There's stuff
that is good and stuff that's not so good. Next,
we have e O L. So in the movie Tron,
e O L was the Master Control programs way of
ending a line of communication. I mean it literally meant
end of line. There's the end of Line club in
(21:46):
the Tron Legacy film. But in this case, I actually
mean e O L as end of life, meaning the
stage of a products life cycle. In which it's just
gonna get worse from here on out. So, for example,
let's take Windows XP, which is a very or was
a very popular operating system. There's still people out there
(22:06):
who are using it today, despite the fact that it's
sadly outdated. Microsoft released Windows XP way back in two
thousand one, and that system dominated the market share for
operating systems on personal computers at the time. And while
Microsoft would release the successor to Windows XP in two
thousand and seven, it actually continued to release service packs
(22:26):
for Windows XP up through two thousand eight, and even
provided extended support until two thousand fourteen. But by then
Microsoft was really pushing people to please, for the love
of technology, update to a more recent operating system. Companies
can't continue to support old software indefinitely and still dedicate
resources to making new stuff. Plus, fewer pieces of current
(22:51):
software were actually compatible with this older Windows operating system,
and so really, by two thousand eight, Windows XP was
entering its e o L phase. Microsoft would stop updating
it and the product would grow increasingly obsolete over time.
Another example of e o L is easy to see
with smartphones. Smartphones depend upon the interaction of hardware, that
(23:13):
being the actual smartphone mobile device and software that being
the operating system for that device, on top of which
all the apps live. So with Apple, we are now
on IO S Sport Team, and the oldest iPhone capable
of running that version of iOS is the iPhone six S.
That one is the one that originally launched in two
(23:34):
thousand fifteen. Older iPhones before the success, even if they
are still operational, are firmly in the e o L
phase because they can no longer keep pace with the
latest operating systems, which means fewer apps are going to
run on them and they will become increasingly useless as
time goes on. For companies, e OL might arrive much
(23:55):
earlier than for customers, so a company will end sales
and marketing effort around a product that it designates as
being in e o L. Essentially, the company says, we're
no longer going to sell this stuff. We're going to
sell the next version of this or you know, some
improved version of this, and they focus on that instead.
So they say we're done dedicating resources to supporting this
(24:17):
so that we can sell more stuff, more new stuff.
So a company could actually start stop selling a product
but continue supporting it for a while longer. In the
case of Microsoft, for example, they stopped selling XP long
before they stopped actually providing support for it. Next is
fact f a Q. I included this one even though
(24:37):
I think probably everyone listening to this already knows it.
It of course stands for frequently asked questions. Anyone who
has ever served as a point of contact for any
organization knows that of the time, you're answering the same
basic questions repeatedly throughout the day. So one way to
address that is to create a fact and that has
(24:59):
those basic answers already in there, so people can see
them right off the bat. So when people use the fact,
it frees up the time of the person who otherwise
would have to respond, and you know, it just makes
it easier to find answers. In general, the term fact
actually predates the web, possibly emerging from the electronic mailing
(25:19):
lists and Usenet groups in the nineteen eighties. Next, we
have f c C. This stands for the Federal Communications Commission,
part of the United States government. It's easiest for me
to just quote the f CC's website to describe what
it does. So here it is quote The Federal Communications
Commission regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite,
(25:45):
and cable in all fifty states, the District of Columbia,
and US territories. An independent US government agency overseen by Congress,
the Commission is the federal agency responsible for implementing and
enforcing America's communications laws and regulations. So that organization formed
after the passing of the Communications Act of nineteen thirty four,
(26:07):
and it has helped shape the landscape of technology quite
a bit in the United States, sometimes for the better
and sometimes not. The FCC is supposed to promote competition
between various communications companies while also encouraging innovation and investment
in services so that people get access to stuff like
broadband connectivity. But a quick look at the telecommunications landscape
(26:31):
in America tells you that for a lot of folks,
the whole competition thing really isn't a thing. It's not
that prominent. I mean, over the years, through various mergers
and acquisitions, we've seen many regions get carved out by
one or maybe two telecommunications companies. And I don't know
what it's like where you live, however, at my home,
(26:51):
because I checked it this morning, just to make sure.
We only have one telecommunications provider that offers connectivity at
high speed needs at my place, and even that isn't fiber.
I don't get fiber connectivity where I live. And I
live in the city of Atlanta, y'all. I mean, I'm
not in like the sticks or something. I'm in the
(27:12):
city limits. But enough about me griping about my personal
lack of connectivity. The FCC has also played an inconsistent
role in terms of ensuring net neutrality in the United States.
The concept of net neutrality includes a lot of stuff,
but one of the big ones is all content should
be treated equally across all service providers. So, in other words,
(27:35):
if there's a company that's both an I s P
and a content company, that I s P should not
prioritize its own traffic over that from other content providers.
There's a lot more to it than that. Net neutrality
is a very big topic, and during certain political administrations,
the FCC has pushed to create rules and policies that
(27:57):
strengthen net neutrality, such as under the Obama administration, while
in others the FCC has largely dismantled those same systems,
such as during Trump's presidency fun times. And the reason
for that change, by the way, is that the leadership
of the f c C comes by appointment by whomever
is president at that time, and so as presidential administrations change,
(28:20):
so too does the f c C. Anyway, you'll hear
a lot about the FCC being involved in various tech
related issues here in the United States. Next up flops. Now,
this doesn't just describe that one stage play I was
in back in two thousand two. Now, this is an
acronym that stands for floating point operations per second. So
(28:43):
if you remember when I talked about c p U
s in the previous episode, I mentioned that we measure
their performance in part by clock cycles, which is kind
of like how many instructions the CPU can execute per second.
But there's another way to measure computer perform mormants, and
that's in how many floating point operations it can handle
per second. So what is a floating point Well, you
(29:07):
can think of it as being similar to scientific note notation,
So you know, really big or really small numbers are
difficult to handle, even for computers, especially computers that have
to handle both at the same time. A computer has
a limit to how many digits it can hold at
any given moment. So floating points are a way to
indicate very large or very small numbers and makes them
(29:30):
much easier to handle and process. When we talk about supercomputers,
we typically refer to the number of flops those computers
can handle. The fastest supercomputer by this metric today is
the Fugaku, which is incredible. It's set an insane record
of four hundred forty two headah flops using the HPL
(29:51):
computer benchmark. It's a way of testing how many floating
operations are floating point operations I should say a computer
can complete in a second. So in the tech world, uh,
what does peda flop mean? Well, we use the word
kilo or the prefix kilo for thousand, we use mega
for a million, Giga for billion, terra for trillion, and
(30:12):
petta is for quadrillion, which means the Fugaku supercomputer reached
four hundred forty two quadrillion floating point operations per second
against this particular benchmark, which is pretty astounding, right. But
according to Tech Republic, Fugaku was also able to achieve
two point oh exa flops against the benchmark of high
(30:33):
performance computing Artificial intelligence workload or hpc AI another benchmark test.
So an exa flop is one quintillion flops. It's even
more like it's just the sucker is fast, is what
I'm saying. But typically when we're talking about flops, we're
talking about high performance compute. We're not talking about you know,
(30:56):
your standard laptop. Next is FPS. This one's actually tricky
because there are a few different FPS initialisms, and some
of them can actually apply to the same stuff but
in different ways. So, for example, in the world of
video games, you can have FPS, meaning a first person shooter,
which is a type of game in which your perspective
(31:16):
is from the first person point of view and you
run around, you know, shooting stuff. But FPS can also
stand for frames per second, as in the number of
rendered frames presented to a viewer each second, and this
version of FPS can apply to all sorts of games,
including first person shooter games, So you can talk about
(31:38):
the FPS for an FPS, which is a lot of fun.
Right anyway, frames per second is important for creating a
smooth video experience. So our vision tricks us if we
see a series of similar images and they're presented to
us in quick succession. We experienced this as if we're
watching something that's actually in motion, that the image itself
(32:00):
is moving. That's the whole basic foundation for film and
for animation. So with a classic film like something that's
actually on film itself, we watched the playback of images
at a rate of twenty four frames per second. That's
fast enough to make it seem as though we're watching
moving images, but in fact, if you just stop the projector,
you would see you're just looking at a series of photographs. Well,
(32:24):
in the digital world, fps is important too, and a
higher FPS typically means a better experience for the viewer,
particularly with video games. Higher FPS can help a gamer
make better choices while playing and time things out just right,
picking up on details that they might miss if they
had a lower FPS. But just as we saw with resolution,
(32:44):
there's a law of diminishing returns at play here, so
once you get over a certain FPS, which varies from
person to person, the benefits become less obvious as they
crank up. There are other fps is within the tech
world to like fast packet switching that refers to how
certain systems handled data transmissions across the system, but there's
(33:05):
no need to jump into all that here, All right,
I got a couple more f's to get through after
this break, so stick around for f's sake. Next up,
we got the f t C, and we're back to
(33:25):
another U. S government agency similar to what we talked
about with f c C, but the f t C
stands for the Federal Trade Commission. So while the f
c C specifically focuses on laws and regulations that relate
to communications, which includes telecommunications and the Internet and radio
and etcetera, the f t C is primarily focused on
(33:46):
enforcing antitrust laws and protecting consumers in the United States.
So in this case, the word trust refers to an
entity or sometimes a small group of entities that dominates
an industry and uses areas means to maintain that dominance
by keeping other companies from being able to compete. So
(34:06):
that can include stuff like fixing prices to undercut smaller competitors,
and these smaller competitors might not have the financial ability
to survive and they're effectively starved out because the dominant
company could sell stuff at a loss and just endure
that loss while waiting for the other businesses to die,
(34:26):
and at that point the company can then drive prices
way up because there's no competition for consumers to turn to.
So the FTC gets involved in a lot of the
tech world because we see some massive consolidations going on
within the space, whether it's Facebook gobbling up another social platform,
or Amazon buying up another marketplace, either real world or online,
(34:49):
or Google buying up pretty much everything in sight. The
FTC plays apart in making certain that companies are playing
by the rules, and like the f c C, this
isn't always you know, apparent, but then I guess it
all depends on how you interpret what the rules actually are.
On the consumer protection side, the FTC is also the
(35:11):
agency responsible for enforcing stuff like KAPPA, the Children's Online
Privacy Protection Act that we recently talked about. Because KAPPA
mostly relates to how companies collect and use children's information
by using the Internet, you might be tempted to think
that it's the f c C that would be in charge,
but that's just not the case. So it can get
(35:31):
a bit confusing when you're talking about the f c
C versus the f TC, and I sometimes mix up
the two myself. I've been guilty of it. The FTC, however,
is also older than the f c C. It traces
its history all the way back to nineteen fourteen. Moving
on f TP. You down with f TP, Yeah, you
(35:52):
know me? All right, I'm kind of dating myself here.
I'm actually very curious if producer Tari even recognized is
that reference? Okay? So, f t P stands for File
Transfer Protocol, and a protocol is just a set of
rules or instructions. So from a high level, this is
the set of rules that the guide how you transfer
(36:16):
files across networks. And when I say you, I really
mean how systems transfer files from one machine to another
across a network. It's one of the underlying technologies for
the Internet, with others being things like email and the
World Wide Web and stuff like that. FTP is also
one of the older protocols with regard to the Internet.
(36:38):
It was first outlined back in ninete. And that's it
for the f Alright, let's move on to g and
first up, we've got g d p R and we
start off with a biggie. This stands for General Data
Protection Regulation and it refers to a regulation in in
law in the European Union, and it concerns itself with
(37:01):
the privacy and data protection of EU citizens. So in
the EU member countries drafted out rules to protect privacy
and personal information and gave EU citizens more of a
say in how their data could be collected and used.
G d PR puts the onus on companies to follow
these rules or potentially face huge fines. Over in the
(37:25):
United States, the explosive growth of the Internet far outpaced
privacy laws, which in the US of been fairly lucy
goosey like there's only a few privacy laws or like
outright privacy laws in the United States. So as a result,
these companies that were web based had established some pretty
(37:46):
aggressive strategies when it comes to collecting, using, and sharing
personal information. In fact, there's an entire industry based around
establishing huge databases of personal info and then charging other
companies to access those databases. Our information are. Personal info
is the currency of much of modern technology. While the
(38:07):
member states of the EU wanted to create rules to
restrict how companies could do this with EU citizens, so
they wouldn't be given free regin to collect and exploit data.
They would actually need to follow specific rules, which includes
alerting users to any points of data collection, as well
as to declare how and why that data will be used.
(38:28):
The restrictions meant that companies had to change how they
handled information, and that in itself became a kind of
micro industry. We had a lot of consultants that worked
with tech companies to make certain that their policies and
processes were compliant with g d p R, because otherwise
things could get super expensive, really fast. They also tend
(38:51):
to involve some pretty negative press. If a company is
found to have violated g DPR, it's not a good look.
The passing of g d p R effectively since shock
waves through the tech industry, which at that point really
wasn't used to governments getting that proactive in the protection
of citizen data, and g DPR has gone on to
inspire some places, like the state of California, to draft
(39:14):
privacy acts that essentially use g DPR as the basis
for that law. There are some exemptions to g d
p R, though, for example, law enforcement is not required
to abide by g DPR, and in matters of national security,
g DPR does not apply. G DPR has also changed
a bit since passing. Originally, there was this concept called
(39:37):
the right to be forgotten, which generally meant that an
EU citizen would have the right to request that their
personal information be deleted from any online sources, including stuff
like online search engines. But critics pointed out that this
policy was flawed. So let's say that we've got a
case where a public figure does something truly terrible, newsworthy
(39:59):
and terrible, like they've committed a crime of some sort. Uh,
if that person were to then follow this this process,
they might be able to demand that all mention of
that crime get a race from the internet, which you
could argue as against the public good. So these days,
the right to be forgotten is now known as the
(40:22):
right of a racer. And uh, it's not the band
eraser I tried to discover a little something to make
me sweeter. No, it's a it's it's a process that's
a little more limited. It cannot go nearly as far
as the right to be forgotten. And uh, it includes
stuff like you have to put in the request of
(40:43):
a ratier within a certain amount of time from publication
or else you missed the boat. Also, there's the consideration
about whether or not removing the information would represent a
public harm, or if it would be more harmful to
the individual if that information were to remain up. There
are a lot of different parts to it. In other words,
next up is Gift, and this is one of our
(41:07):
more contentious entries on this list. So obviously I still
pronounce g I F as GIF. I do not pronounce
it as jeff. The initialism stands for Graphics Interchange Format
and it's a subtype of bitmap image formats. The online
service provider compu Serve developed the GIFT file format in
(41:30):
the nineteen eighties, led by developer Steve will Hit. Now
Steve Wilhit pronounces it Jeff and that therefore he's wrong,
which I'm joking. I'm not. He's not really wrong. In fact,
the various dictionaries say that both pronunciations are acceptable, but
I mean, come on. The G stands for graphic, not giraffic. Anyway,
(41:54):
will Heights team was looking for a way to create
image files that didn't take up an enormous amount of
file space. So this was before the Worldwide Web, but
people were using online service providers and bulletin boards and
they wanted a way of being able to share images
or to download images, and the Gift team created a
(42:15):
format that limited color selection to two fifty six colors,
which helped keep file sizes down, and they used a
compression algorithm to kind of squitch these file sizes down,
and the gift was born. The compression algorithm identifies repeating
patterns within an image and then takes those patterns and
simplifies them for the purposes of expressing them within the file.
(42:36):
So this means that let's say you've got an image
that has a lot of, you know, a particular shade
of blue in one section, the file can essentially say, hey,
over here, in this part defined by these parameters, all
of that is just blue, rather than laying out that
each blue pixel is individually in each position. Now I
am oversimplifying here, but that from a high level is
(42:58):
kind of what was going on on. By stringing together
a sequence of gifts, it's possible to have them play
in a loop, and thus we get the animated gift.
Though many of the animated gifts we see today are
actually small video files that just kind of you know,
they use code to make them behave in a way
that we think of as animated gifts. But it turns
(43:20):
out that the video coding technology has actually outpaced gift code,
so we tend to see small video files rather than
actual gifts. However, the gift name has stuck around, even
though it's not necessarily a gift file extension. Next up
is GPS. This stands for Global Positioning System. Often we
(43:41):
refer to a device, like, you know, something that we
use in a car, as a GPS, by which we
mean a navigational device that relies upon this Global positioning
system to calculate that devices position relative to the surface
of the Earth. That's a wordy way of saying that
the devices using information from satellites to figure out where
(44:02):
the heck it is. Back in the nineteen seventies, the
Department of Defense in the United States began working on
what would become the GPS, and it would take a
couple of decades to complete it. But by the early
nineteen nineties, the full complement of twenty four satellites that
were part of this original plan were up in orbit,
(44:22):
and they were needed so that you could get global
coverage for GPS. Otherwise, before that, you know, coverage was
sporadic based upon whether or not you had the appropriate
number of satellites within range of you in orbit. Now
these satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth,
so in other words, they're not remaining in a fixed
(44:43):
position relative to a point on the Earth's surface, so
they are in an orbit that's at a different rate
than the Earth's rotation, also a different trajectory than Earth's rotation,
and that's why you need to have multiple satellites, like
twenty four of them to maintain constant coverage, because satellites
pass out of range at certain points and other satellites
(45:06):
will come into range. That's why you need that many
up there. The satellites send out signals that receivers on Earth,
like the one in your car can pick up, or
the one on your phone for that matter, And each
signal sent by a satellite contains some information that it's
really important. One of it those pieces of information is
a precise time stamp that says exactly when the satellite
(45:29):
broadcast that that signal, and also there's some data that
indicates that particular satellites orbital location. So the receiver has
to pick up signals from at least three satellites to
get a physical location. Because of the time stamp, the
receiver quote unquote knows how long that signal had traveled
(45:49):
from the satellite to the receiver. The receiver has to
compare this against its own time reading, typically from an
atomic clock. But more on that in the second Now,
this means that the receiver knows how far away it
is from the satellite, because the satellite communication travels at
the speed of light. So you just take the amount
of time it took for the signal to go from
(46:11):
when it was broadcast to when it was picked up
by the receiver, and you use that to figure out
how many miles it traveled in that span of time
because it was traveling at the speed of light. So
then you could draw a sphere around the satellite, like
a virtual sphere, that represents all the points that are
that distance away from the satellite in every single direction. Now,
(46:32):
granted you're only interested in the points that make an
intersection with the Earth, but there will be a lot
of those. So then you want to compare that with
other satellites. You need at least three, and then you're
looking at the intersection of where these different spheres meet,
and with three satellites you get two points where the
(46:53):
spheres will all intersect. One of those two points will
definitely be on the surface of Earth. The other one
may or may not be. So, then by looking at
the point that's actually on the surface of the Earth,
the receiver says, Okay, now I know where I am
because I'm able to tell by the distance I am
from these three different satellites. It's really really neat um.
(47:16):
It's it's kind of similar to um triangulation, but not
exactly the same. Anyway, with four satellites, you can actually
eliminate the need for the receiver to have access to
its own atomic clock to make certain to correct for errors.
And there's a lot more to it than that. For example,
until the nineteen nineties, within the US, civilian use of
(47:37):
GPS was really limited because GPS was meant for military use,
so civilian receivers they existed, but they also purposefully introduced
errors into the display, so you could not use a
GPS to get a specific reading of your location. You
can get kind of a general reading, so you wouldn't
(47:57):
be able to use it to do stuff like make
turn I turned directions in real time because your receiver's
location readoubt could be off by several hundred feet, so
it could be like turn left, you're gonna turn left
either in a hundred feet or it might be three
feet behind you, so not very useful. But then later
(48:17):
on President Clinton lifted that restriction, and since then we've
been able to use GPS receivers to help us get
to where we're going. Or you know, if you're using
Apple Maps, you can use it to drive into a river.
I'm kidding. I'm just using a very outdated joke about
the reliability of Apple Maps, which obviously has improved significantly
(48:38):
since it first launched, so it's an unfair joke for
me to make. These days, there are more than thirty
five GPS satellites out in orbit, and the technology also
is a great way to explore the concepts of general
and special relativity, because you have to have an understanding
of both of those things in order to correct for
the issues of time dilation. But that's a complicate, aided
(49:00):
subject for another time. In fact, I have covered that
in past episodes, so check that out if you want
to learn how it is that GPS proves that Einstein
was right. It's pretty fascinating stuff, all right, And that's
it for this episode. We're gonna leave off here. We're
gonna pick back up in our next one to continue
(49:21):
our glossary that will be next week, starting on Monday,
and we'll continue to work our way through these various
acronyms and initialisms to kind of demystify the world of tech,
which gets very reliant on jargon and acronyms and stuff
to the point where it can feel kind of like
it's excluding others on purpose. And I don't dig that.
I like to be inclusive, so we're gonna keep on going.
(49:42):
In the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics I
should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out
to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter.
The handle we use is tech Stuff hs W and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
(50:05):
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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