June 23, 2021 • 47 mins
What does MPEG stand for? What does MIDI do? And are P2P networks inherently bad? We learn some more tech initialisms and acronyms.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from my 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 of all things tech. And we are
back on the tech glossary topic, in which we look
(00:25):
at the various initialisms and acronyms used in the tech
world and figure out what they actually mean. In the
last episode, we worked up to I r C or
Internet Relay Chat. I made a joke that I can
get through all the eyes in that episode because I
can stands for Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers.
(00:46):
But I actually have a few more eyes to cover
before we move on, So I made a liar out
of myself. Let's do it, and we're gonna start with
I S d N that stands for Integrated Services Digital Network.
This requires a bit of a backstory. So way back
in the day, we only had what's called the plane
(01:08):
old telephone service or pots POTS, So that's kind of
a bonus acronym right there, and actually we still do
have that in some regard. But let's get back to
business here. Back before the nineteen sixties, all the telephone
connections depended upon actual interconnected physical wires and mechanical systems
(01:28):
and analog signals. So as more lines were joining the system,
and again these were analog signals passed over twisted pair
cables of wire, it became increasingly messy. Right as more
people and companies and places started to add phone lines,
it started to get to be a real mess and
(01:49):
analog systems were not great at supplying reliable long distance
communications service where you had to interconnect between different regional networks.
Around the nineteen fifties, the telephone companies began to work
on automating various systems and one potential solution, the one
that turned out to be the winner, was to migrate
(02:10):
from a purely analog telephone system to a voiceover digital
line system. Now that digital system also allowed for the
transmission of digital data, not just you know, voice, but
other types of information, and in the late nineteen eighties,
a part of the United Nations called the International Telecommunications
Union or i t U, another bonus initialism, began to
(02:34):
recommend the I s d N standard for data transmission
over phone lines. But there were actually two competing versions
of I S d N. There was not a standardized
version at first, that caused a lot of delays as
far as implementation and roll out, until a unified standard
emerged in the nineteen nineties, so I s d N
(02:56):
finally kind of entered the scene and allowed for faster
data transmission speeds or more accurately, greater data throughput. More
on that in a little bit, But before too long,
other technologies like DSL and cable modems would replace I
s d N. Now you still find I s d
N in some places, and I should probably do a
(03:16):
full episode about it in the future to really talk
about its development, its history, and its implementation. But these
episodes are already going far beyond what I expected, so
I will spare you. Let's move on. I SP This
is an easy one. It stands for Internet service provider.
These are the companies that provide Internet connectivity services to customers.
(03:38):
Those customers might be people, and they might be businesses
or other organizations or very organized people. I guess some
I s p s also offer other services, uh, usually
directly connected to Internet services, and uh, you know, some
other I s p s end up offering services that
are related to telecommunications. So, for example, there are I
(04:01):
s P s that might say, all right, well, if
you purchase service from us, not only will you have
Internet connectivity, will also give you an email address, we
will host a personal website for you. We might have
other software that you have access to. And then you've
got you know, things like cable companies that are also
(04:21):
I s p s, and they'll bundle Internet service with
cable TV or telephone service. You get the idea. It's
pretty common thing now. Back in the nineteen nineties, there
were around ten thousand I s p s in the world,
with the United States laying claim to more than half
of them. And if you've listened to my episodes on
earth Link, you heard me talk about one of those
(04:42):
I s p s. And these I s p s
frequently focused on specific regions, and hey, you know, the
Internet is a global thing. So these companies were relying
on bigger telecommunications companies to actually connect various you know,
computers together on the Internet. But telecommunications companies like telephone
companies and cable companies already had this infrastructure in place
(05:06):
to deliver services to customers that could easily be converted
over or added onto with the Internet speeds, so you
could have Internet be there in addition to the other
services you provided, and these regional I sp s just
couldn't match that, right, They just didn't have that that
kind of infrastructure. And so there are still regional I
(05:29):
s p s. They do exist, but they essentially sit
on top of these other larger telecommunication company I s
p s. And I bring this up because there may
be cases in the United States and which it looks
like you might have multiple I s P options in
your area, but it's probably that all of the smaller
ones are just piggybacking on the infrastructure of the big one.
(05:53):
So what they're doing is they're essentially leasing space, if
you want to think of it that way, on the
tele communication companies technology, and then they resell that to customers. Now,
the price that these regional I s p s get
isn't the same price that you would pay to have
Internet access. However, you might be paying more with the
(06:15):
regional I s P and they might try and make
it up make up for it with additional services like
those software packages I was talking about earlier. Okay, let's
move on I T. Okay. I included I T because
Jen Barber didn't know what it meant. And it means
information technology jen. The term originates from the late nineteen seventies,
(06:38):
which coincidentally marks the earliest days of the first personal computers,
and Miriam Webster defines it as quote the technology involving
the development, maintenance, and use of computer systems, software, and
networks for the processing and distribution of data end quote.
And that definition is a pretty broad one, and made
even larger with the era of big data, which necessitates
(07:03):
more robust networks and more sophisticated methods of data analysis.
And today we typically associate i T with networks in
general and the Internet in particular, but clearly the term
can apply to all sorts of computer systems. Okay, we're
killing it, let's keep moving. JPEG This stands for Joint
(07:23):
Photographic Experts Group, a joint committee that forms specifically for
the purposes of establishing standards for the coding of still pictures.
But when we use JPEG, we usually mean the file
format that this group created, not the group itself, So
we mean JPEG or JPG as a file extension of
(07:46):
file type. So the JPEG file format is an image file. Specifically,
it's a lossy compression file format, which means it's a
way to code still images, but you manage file size
by losing some of the data associated with that file.
Like a raw image file. If you were to take,
(08:06):
you know, a really nice digital camera and take a
photo of it, a raw image file is really really big,
and that could be a bit of a problem. With JPEG.
You compress that down, but you lose some of the
information in the process, and the higher the compression you choose,
the more data you have to lose in the process,
and as a result, the image will not look as good.
(08:29):
The more you compress it, the worst the image is
going to look, but the smaller the file size. There
was a need for this kind of file type because
the Internet in general, and the Web in particular, really
needed that in order to take off. Most of the
world was dependent upon dial up speeds in the early
days of the Web, and dial up speeds were not
(08:51):
terribly fast. Anyone who used a dial up modem to
log into say a bulletin board system back in the
nineteen eighties, before really the the dawn of the consumer Internet,
they know that it could take forever to download an image,
and by forever, I just mean like a crazy long
(09:12):
amount of time. But these compression formats like JPEG meant
that you could get images with smaller file sizes, which
meant faster download times for those files. This was also
important for stuff like email, which frequently has pretty strict
limits on how large a message can be before you
can send it out, like if it goes over that
(09:32):
you get that little annoying message saying you've exceeded the
the size allowed for sending out an email. The JPEG
standard took off like gangbusters and was a big part
of why the web itself was able to take off.
It allowed for an experience that incorporated more images, and
the committee introduced other JPEG standards later on, but the
(09:54):
original JPEG format was so popular that the subsequent standards
didn't really get much action, even though they had, you know,
arguably superior compression algorithms. Moving on, now we have a
trio here, and really it's just a an indication of
a whole series of things, which is kbps, mbps, and
(10:15):
g bps. These all referenced data throughput. Kbps is kill
a bits per second or thousands of bits per second,
mbps is megabits per second or millions of bits per second,
and g bps is gigabits per second or billions of
bits per second, and a bit is a single unit
(10:37):
of binary information. It's either a zero or a one,
so you can think of it kind of like a
physical switch that has two positions off or on. Sometimes
people confuse a word like mega bit with the word megabyte,
but a byte is actually eight bits. To go into
why this is would actually require a pretty long story race,
(11:00):
so I'll save that for a different episode. But it
is good to know that megabit and megabyte are two
different things. So if you have a connection and your
connection speed is one hundred megabits per second for downloads,
and then you go to download a file that's one
hundred megabytes, you have a hundred megabits per second. That
doesn't mean that you could download a hundred megabyte file
(11:22):
in one second. That that's different. Also, we tend to
think of this as download speeds, Like a one hundred
megabit per second connection is a faster connection than a
one kill a bit per second connection, but it's slower
than a hundred gigabit per second, which told be phenomenal.
But the way we're describing this as kind of inaccurate.
(11:45):
We use it this way, because it's how we experience
this by by figuring out how long it takes us
to transfer certain amounts of information over a connection. But really,
by and large, all the data traveling across networks is
moving at the same speed. I'm kind of oversimplifying, but
largely this is true. So in other words, if I
(12:05):
have a connection that is just fifty six kill a
bits per second, like I'm using a dial up modem
and I'm getting fifty six kill a bits per second download,
that's fifty six thousand bits per second. But you are
on a fiber connection, you're pulling down a gigabit per
second it's or one billion bits per second. While your
connection is better than mine, you're gonna get way more
(12:28):
data per second than I am. The actual speed of
the data traveling across these connections is pretty much the same.
It's just that your connection allows for way more data
to travel at that speed. The mind does. This is
easier to understand with an analogy. So let's say we've
got a really big room full of people, and all
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the people in this room can walk at the same
top speed, and we'll say it's just three miles that's
their top speed of walking. We've got three doorways out
of this room. One doorway is wide enough just to
let one person through at a time, Doroy number two
is wide enough to let two people out at a time,
and Doroy number three is super wide. It allows twenty
(13:10):
people to leave at a time, shoulder to shoulder. Now
that last doorway is going to allow way more people
to exit the room in a given amount of time
than the other two would, But all the people are
still walking at that same top speed of three miles
per hour. So when someone says they have a fast
Internet connection, you can be that person to say, well, actually,
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you have an Internet connection with a high data throughput,
and then you can probably escort yourself out of the
area because no one will want to be around you.
Trust me, I know this from experience. Here in the
United States, the national benchmark for broadband speeds is twenty
five megabits per second. That's twenty five megabits per second
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download speed coming from the Internet to your device. In
other words, then it's three megabit per second up that's
going from your device up to the Internet. So it's
it's not the same coming down as it is going up.
For most Internet connections, it's not, you know, symmetrical. In
other words, it's asymmetrical. Well, we got that standard for
(14:16):
that benchmark here in the United States back in two
thousand fifteen. Before that, the US definition of broadband was
embrace yourself for megabits per second down one megabit per
second up. And I am not joking, and that is
pretty low. So with the twenty five megabits down three
megabits up benchmark for broadband, we learned in the US
(14:39):
from census data back in twenty nineteen that twenty three
of people in the US lack a wired broadband connection.
This has been the center of numerous political issues, including
the f c cs stance on whether or not it
has the authority to classify broadband internet as a utility
or something that is a basic right for all citizens.
(15:01):
That's something that is a It's an ongoing debate, and
it changes largely because the FCC itself changes every time
there's a change in an administration at the top of
US politics gets pretty complicated. Moving on, let's talk about
land and W. LAND So land or l a N
(15:22):
stands for local area network. This just refers to a
series of interconnected computer devices within a limited area. So
this could be as large as a college campus or
as small as a really cramped computer dorm room. It
doesn't all have to take place in colleges. But just
trust me on that last one. It's that counts as
a land. Now, the Internet is the network of networks,
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but a land does not necessarily have to connect out
to the Internet. It can be self contained. So you
might create a land to work on stuff that probably
shouldn't be Internet accessible. That allows you to have what's
called an air gap, which means there's just no direct
link between that system and the Internet at large. Or
you might just have a land to facilitate a specific
(16:10):
type of computing. The example I always think about is
back in the nineties with the popularity of land parties
that referred to when geeks like me would go and
carry our computers with us to meet up with other geeks,
and then we would all link our computers together with
actual physical cables, or sometimes it would be gaming consoles
(16:31):
instead of computers, but you get what I'm saying, and
we'd link things together in order to play multiplayer games.
Because before internet broadband speeds made online gaming really feasible,
this was how we would you know the hoops we
jumped through in order to create a network to play
games like Descent and Duke Nukem three D against each other. Typically,
(16:53):
it's also how e sports tend to work. They use
local area networks so that one team or player doesn't
have a distinct advantage or disadvantage due to a difference
in paying times. A ping, by the way, refers to
a signal scent from one computer to another, typically like
a server, and then the return signal comes back, and
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it's a way of measuring the lag between those two
connection points. And you don't want one team to be
a disadvantage just because they're they're ping was worse, because
that doesn't indicate whether they were better players or not,
or poorer players are not. So local area networks are
a way to kind of eliminate that, or at least
reduce it. A w land or w L a N
(17:39):
is surprise, surprise, a wireless land. So this is a
network that does the same thing as a local area network,
only without the physical cables. And like a land, a
w land doesn't necessarily have to connect out to the
Internet as a whole. It can, but it doesn't have
to these days, broadband speeds allow for on line and
(18:00):
even cloud based gaming and computational uses without the need
for land parties, though some folks will still go and
do them, and to be honest, nothing really replaces the
experience of, you know, going to a land party and
playing with or against other people in the same physical location,
where the talking of smack can become an art form.
(18:21):
It's typically also a little less um objectively terrible than
what you would find with online chat that is like
the worst, but in person it tends to not quite
get that extreme though I guess one downside is that
you can't easily mute another player that that player is
saying next to you and annoying the heck out of you,
(18:41):
unless you know, you happen to have some duct tape handy.
By the way, always carry duct tape. We've got more
to go, but I feel like we've picked up the
pace a little bit and when we come back, will
continue going down the alphabet, but first a quick break. Okay,
(19:02):
we're back, and now let's pick up with l c D.
This stands for liquid crystal display, which probably sounds a
little odd. After all, the general definition for a crystal
is that a crystal is a type of solid material
in which the constituent components are in a highly ordered structure,
like a lattice or scaffolding. So if you were to
(19:25):
take a piece of quartz or table salt and you
looked at it under a really powerful microscope, you would
see these this what looks like a fairly smooth surfaces
in fact made up of these repeated patterns of lattice
like structures that form the overall you know, solid substance.
(19:45):
But if crystal is a subset of solid materials, then
what the heck is a liquid crystal? How can you
have a liquid crystal? Well, we use the term liquid
crystals to describe stuff that as a state of matter
that has some elements of crystalline solid features and some
elements of a liquid material. So, in other words, you
(20:08):
might have a substance that, like a liquid, will take
on the shape of whatever container it's in, you know,
like a bowl of water. You wouldn't have a square
of water just sitting in the middle of a bowl,
though the water conforms to the shape of the bowl.
But if you were to look at that liquid under
a microscope, you would see that it's molecules are all
in a specific orientation, more like a crystalline structure. These
(20:30):
are really cool substances and they allow for all sorts
of neat applications. So with a liquid crystal display, these
crystals make images right, well, not exactly all right, So
there are liquid crystals that, when exposed to an electric current,
will change shape. There's a type called twisted pneumatics that
(20:50):
do this, and as the name suggests, these crystals have
a naturally twisted shape. But when you apply a current
to them, they will untwist to some degree, and the
degree to which they untwist depends upon the voltage of
that current. So by precisely controlling a voltage of a current,
you can then precisely control how much these liquid crystals
(21:13):
are able to untwist. And in addition, liquid crystals in
l c D s can transmit and change polarized light. Now,
a full discussion on what polarized light is and how
it works is well beyond this particular podcast episode, but
basically this means that through filters you can change the
orientation of light, and with l c D s you
(21:34):
can change which light is able to pass through into,
you know, a display or from a display to view,
and that determines what you see on that display. L
c D s require typically a backlight. There are some
that rely on reflective material, so it relies on light
from your environment hitting the display and then you see
(21:55):
the reflection. But with things like l c D monitors
and tell visions, we're talking about a backlit device, and
because of that, l c D s traditionally have limitations
when it comes to displaying a high contrast ratio. Contrast
refers to the difference between the brightest colors a display
can show versus the darkest colors it can show. And
(22:16):
because l c D monitors and televisions have a backlight,
that affects how dark you can get because there's always
a little bit of bleed through with light. The history
and tech of l c D s is truly fascinating stuff,
so I'll save that for a future episode. Next, we
have L E D and O l E D. Luckily,
(22:37):
we have some tech that frequently pops up when you're
talking about displays, and here we go, and L E
D is a light emitting diode and an O l
E D is an organic light emitting diode. So obviously
we need to define some stuff here, right, So first
of all, what in the blue blazes is a diode.
It is a component in electronics that acts as kind
(22:59):
of like a one way street for electrical current. So
a diode will allow current to pass in one direction,
but it will prevent it from going the opposite direction.
Diodes are one of the basic elements in circuitry and electronics,
and it's a type of semiconductor. And there's a lot
more to be said, but we can't spend all podcasts
(23:22):
talking about it. So an l e ED or light
emitting diode is a subset of diodes. So it allows
electricity or current rather to pass one way but not
the other. And as the name suggests, it's a diode
that emits light as current flows through it. Essentially, electrons
get pushed to higher energy levels, and when the electrons
(23:43):
are moving back down to their normal energy levels, they
have to release that excess energy and they do that
in the form of photons. You know, the particles of light.
L E d s don't need as much energy to
produce light as other light sources. They are far are
more energy efficient than say, incandescent bulbs. They're even more
(24:04):
energy efficient than fluorescent lights. They also last a lot
longer than either of those two types of lights, so
LED light bulbs are great though they tend to be
pretty expensive, particularly compared to fluorescence and the old incandescence,
but they last a lot longer and the amount of
energy they use is much lower, so switching to them
(24:25):
can save money over the long term. It's just that
upfront cost is a high one. And LED television uses
l e d s as the backlight source, and they
have great optical range and as I mentioned, they have
high energy efficiency which brings down the power consumption on
flat panel televisions that use L e d s. They've
been around since two thousand five, and they tend to
(24:47):
have better contrast ratios than your typical, you know, normal
l C D. Television's pre L e ED and organic
light emitting diode is an L e ED that contains
an organic compound on film, and that compound film is electroluminescent,
which means that lights up when current passes through it.
(25:08):
One of the many cool things about O l e
d s is that, since we're talking about a film,
you can actually create O l e D based displays
that are extremely thin and are in fact flexible. You
have to have the right electronics behind it that are
also flexible, but you can have flexible displays. So oh
lad displays have led to some really cool features, you know,
(25:31):
like bending TVs or curving TVs, or televisions that can
fold up or unfold or unrolled. Then smartphones as well,
we've seen some at least concepts of that. So these
malleable display technologies depend on oh lads, and most of
them cost more than my house did. Well, at least
(25:51):
that used to be the case. These days, you can
find oh LED televisions capable of displaying resolutions of four
K or higher starting at around dollars. That is not
chump change, I know, but it's still way less expensive
than the earliest oh LED TVs, which cost in the
tens of thousands of dollars when they first hit the market.
(26:15):
Moving on next, we have MAC. Mac is the name
of the fictional boxer in the punch Out series, but
it also stands for Media Access Control, and we typically
see it paired with the word address, giving us MAC address.
This refers to a unique identifier for a network interface
controller or n i C, so there's another bonus initialism.
(26:39):
This is used to identify a specific element connected to
a computer network, and it just takes a little thinking
to realize how this is necessary. Right, if you're connecting
various machines together in a network, you need some way
to identify every single device connected, or else you would
never know how to send information from one specific machineing
(27:00):
to another. It would be more like a giant party
line with all machines just broadcasting to the rest of
the network, and that would be chaos. You wouldn't know
who was saying what, and it would all be jumbled up.
It's bad enough to think about just in terms of communication,
but when you get to stuff like file transfers and
the like, it would just be untenable. So a MAC
(27:20):
address usually is something that is burned into a particular
network interface controller, So it's actually like a permanent thing
as part of a piece of hardware that connects as
part of the network um and it's determined by whatever
company manufactured that controller. So you could think of it
kind of like a serial number that's tattooed onto the controller,
(27:42):
and each tattoo is unique in that network. Now, sometimes
a MAC address is only mostly permanent, which means there
are actually some methods in which a person like a
network administrator could change a MAC address for a specific
piece of hardware. Now for the fun bit, these network
interface controller and their unique MAC addresses. These are necessary
(28:04):
within a single network. So let's say we've got two
n i c s connected inside Network A. They would
each need a unique MAC address or else nothing would work.
But let's say we've actually got two separate networks. We've
got network A and we've got network B. And we
find out that there's an n i C in Network
(28:24):
A and it has the exact same MAC address as
an n I C network B. Does everything fall apart?
Then nope. These unique MAC addresses are only necessary within
a single network. So when you have two different n
i c s connecting to separate networks, they can have
the same MAC address, no problem, there's no conflict there.
(28:45):
There's a lot more to say than that, but you know,
you know the old song and dance at this point.
MIDI is next. This is Musical Instrument Digital Interface m
I d I. This is one of my favorite technologies.
It's a technical ANDERD that is sort of like an umbrella.
So under this technical standard, you have specifications for digital
(29:06):
interfaces as well as the connectors that connect these various
digital interfaces to things like electric musical instruments and computers.
And you have a communications protocol, and this allows various
electronic audio and computer equipment to quote unquote talk to
each other. So a MIDI keyboard like a musical keyboard,
(29:28):
like a synthesizer, a synthesizer specifically with MIDI, that is,
with the right connectors, you could connect that directly to
a computer or to a digital audio station that in
turn connects to a computer. And it could be any
kind of computer as well. Like I always think of
big desktops because I think of the big like production
type stuff. But you can have a laptop, it could
(29:49):
be a smartphone, it could be a tablet. As long
as you have the compatible connectors that allow you to
insert that into the system, it would work. And the
MIDI protocol emerge in the nineteen eighties as electronic music
was really evolving, digital instruments and digital editing tools were
changing the industry. But that also meant there needed to
be some sort of standardized way to handle all this stuff,
(30:12):
or else we would again run into that problem where
you have a billion different proprietary formats that emerge, and
they make things difficult. Interestingly, MIDI does not transmit any
sort of audio signal. You may have listened to music
played back from a MIDI file, but that file doesn't
actually contain any sound. You can think of it more
(30:34):
as that file contains the description of sound instructions for
creating sound. So it's kind of like telling a system
you need to play this specific note at this specific
time for this long and with this an intonation and
with this amount of volume, the and through many an
(30:54):
engineer could change really really minute tiny things about digital recording,
how a note gets expressed. It's really neat stuff. This means,
by the way, that if you have a MIDI keyboard,
meaning a you know, like a musical keyboard that is
MIDI compliant, that keyboard has to have some other component
inside of it that actually generates the sound you could
(31:17):
create if you wanted to a purely MIDI keyboard without
that kind of component, but that would mean that if
you were to play that keyboard, you wouldn't actually be
generating any You couldn't like feed that to a speakers
or anything. It wouldn't create sound. I mean the only
sound you would get was that percussive sound of your
fingers hitting the keys, which kind of seems like it
(31:38):
would be a type of performance art that I would
really rather not sit through. One of the best analogies
I've seen, and I really wish that I had come
up with this one, is that MIDI is to digital
music the way old piano roles were for player pianos.
So a piano role doesn't generate sound on its own,
It only works when you put it through a player piano. Know.
(32:01):
The real beauty of this is how Middy allows for
the computational control of musical expression, which can come in
awfully handy if you're seeking out a particular sound and
vibe for a piece of music. Even if you don't
use the electronic digital version as your final product, it
might give you the feeling you want, so that when
(32:21):
you record it for real z s with you know,
quote unquote real musical instruments. I object to that phrase,
but some people use it. It means that then you
could replicate what you had created digitally. Now I've done
episodes about Mindy, so if you're interested in learning more,
be sure to do a search on the tech Stuff archives.
When we come back, we'll finish out the MS and
(32:44):
it's with a biggie. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay,
MP three and impact All right, here we go. MP
three stands for IMPEG Audio Layer three. But then that
(33:06):
raises the question of what the heck does IMPEG stand for?
And we got to get there. So IMPEG technically stands
for the Moving Picture Experts Group. So you remember earlier
in this episode about JPEG's and how that came out
of a subcommittee that was working on the digital coding
of still images. This is kind of similar, except IMPEG
(33:29):
brings together various working groups of engineers from different organizations
to create standardized ways to encode different kinds of media,
which includes, but is not exclusive to video. And that
gets a little confusing, right, I mean, you would think
that a group called the Moving Picture Experts Group would
be concerning itself only with moving pictures like a video.
(33:52):
The group came together in the late nineteen eighties, and
while the primary effort was in encoding video digitally, that
includes the necessity of encoding audio as well, because a
lot of video has audio associated with it, and encoding
also includes compression because raw media files like video and
audio are pretty darn big, like way too large to
(34:16):
transmit easily over network connections. Way back in the nineties,
those were slow connections and it just wasn't feasible. So
these working groups in this alliance innovated in ways to
code video and audio digitally in ways that computers can handle,
and to compress file sizes down so they weren't quite
so huge and you could actually transfer them from one
(34:39):
computer to another without it taking a week. I think
most folks when they use the word IMPEG, or rather
I guess the acronym IMPEG, they actually mean the file
extension IMPEG or MPG. This is just one of the
formats that this particular working group spawned. An IMPEG file
(35:00):
is a compressed video file format. Uh. It's one that
used either IMPEG one or IMPEG two file compression. But
these days most of the time we're talking about IMPEG
two because that's the type of file compression designed for
higher definition video. IMPEG one was like VHS level definition.
Because you gotta remember this was coming out in the
(35:22):
late eighties when VHS was still a thing, so not
very practical for today's video. It's the enhanced version of
IMPEG compression is IMPEG two. Some folks use IMPEG as
shorthand for just video file even if the video file
isn't an IMPEG format, so that can get a little confusing.
But then that raises the question what about MP three. Well,
(35:43):
that's a coding format specifically for digital audio, and it's
a lossy form of compression, which means that in the
process of compressing the audio file to a smaller size,
the protocol ditches some of the information from that original
raw audio file. So how does the MP three process
quote unquote know which information it should lose? And it's
(36:07):
all based on psychoacoustics, or how we perceive sound, and moreover,
which sounds might be beyond the scope of human hearing.
For example, because of our limitations in our perception, it
is very hard for us to hear a soft sound
that's played immediately after a very loud sound. So let's
(36:30):
say you've got a digital audio file and that has
a very soft sound played right after a really loud one.
The MP three compression algorithm essentially says, heck, no one's
gonna be able to hear this little soft sound anyway,
So we might as well lose it if you can't
hear it, it doesn't need to be there, and snip
that a little bit of data doesn't make it into
(36:52):
the compressed file. Similarly, there may be some sounds within
that digital audio recording that are below or above the
threshold of human hearing when it comes to pitch, so
we typically define this as consisting of tones between twenty hurts,
which is a very very low pitch, and twenty thousand hurts,
which is a very high pitch, and most folks start
(37:14):
to lose the ability to hear the higher pitches as
they age. This has led to some interesting technologies, such
as sounds designed to annoy young people that old people
can't hear, so it's used to help discourage loitering in
blazes like convenience stores. True Story and n P three
algorithm could trim away all frequencies that are identified as
(37:37):
being outside the scope of typical human hearing. The MP
three compression algorithm is kind of a sliding scale, so
you can set parameters as to how much you want
to compress the file size that in turn will affect
how drastically the algorithm will alter the raw audio, So
this can result in a compressed file that just doesn't
(37:58):
sound good. And there are plenty of audio files who
will just turn their noses up at lossy compression formats
like MP three no matter what level of compression you use,
and they prefer lossless file formats that keep all the
information there. And in some cases they have a point,
but in others, well, your own experience might vary drastically
(38:21):
from someone else's. My own hearing must be shot because,
at least in some cases, I have trouble telling the
difference between a decent MP three and a lossless audio
format of the same file played on the same set
of equipment. Moving on next, we have n f C.
(38:41):
This stands for near field communications and we're back on
more protocols. So in this case, we're talking about communications
protocols that allow for electronic communication between two devices that
are pretty darn close to each other. And by pretty
darn close, I mean they have to be at at
maximum four centimeters apart or one and a half inches.
(39:02):
You get beyond that and the NFC range doesn't work.
NFC allows for low throughput data exchanges, meaning you wouldn't
use NFC two, say, transfer a digital movie from a
computer to a smartphone or tablet. The protocols just don't
allow for that, at least not on any time scale
that would be convenient. Instead, NFC is meant to transfer
(39:26):
small bits of data for specific purposes. For example, you
might use an NFC enabled device to tap to pay
for something with a compatible payment system. You've got a
credit cards stored in your smartphone, your smartphone's got NFC chip.
The vendor you go to has an NFC pay area.
You just tap your phone to that and it makes
(39:48):
the little communications transfer and boom your set. There are
electronic ticket systems that use this kind of stuff where
you can use your phone as like an electronic ticket
to get into a venue and no one has to
scan a kee our code or anything like that. You
just tap your phone. NFC allows for the communication between
your device and the venue device, and boom, once it's authenticated,
(40:09):
you get to go in. That's the kind of stuff
that we're talking about here. And while you wouldn't use
NFC to transmit large files directly, you could use NFC
to facilitate some other type of connection between devices that
does allow for larger file transfers. So, for example, you
might be able to tap your phone against the computer
(40:31):
that happens to store, you know, like a particular digital
movie you want to transfer, and NFC might be used
to establish a wireless network link between your smartphone and
the computer, and then the movie would transfer over this
wireless network link. It wouldn't be using NFC itself to
do that. NFC would just be used to initiate that connection.
(40:52):
One popular example of NFC technology is the Ambo, a
collection of toys from Nintendo that use NFC chips to
allow the toys to connect with Nintendo game systems like
the Wii U and the Nintendo Switch. If you're not
familiar with these things, So there are these little toys
that have, you know, a flat base, so you might
(41:12):
have Mario or or Samus or think characters like that
link Zelda, so they're typically famous Nintendo characters. You buy
these toys and then on certain games with these systems,
you can bring the toy in close contact with the
game system, and doing so unlocks new features in the game,
(41:32):
which might mean that you can play as a new character,
or you unlock levels that you didn't have access to before,
or you get a new set of moves or equipment.
All sorts of stuff like that. It's a pretty neat
implementation of NFC technology. Other simple uses of NFC can
include anything from sharing information so it's like the equivalent
of exchanging business cards but you're doing it digitally, or
(41:57):
using an old mobile device to transfer settings to a
new one. So you buy a new phone, you bring
your new phone in close contact with your old phone.
Your old phone says this is how this owner likes things,
and your new phone immediately adopts those settings, so that
way your phone's already the way you like it. I've
done that multiple times with my various phones. Moving on,
(42:20):
we have o e M. This stands for original equipment manufacturer,
and typically we use o e M to describe a
company that's in the business of making components that are
used in the products of other companies. So, in other words,
and o e M is a type of company that
might make the circuit board you find in a particular
electronic device marketed by I don't know, let's say Atari.
(42:42):
So Atari makes the device, or at least markets and
sells it, but some of the components in that device
come from other companies O e M s. Sometimes this
gets a bit muddy. So, for example, let's say you
were to buy a computer off the shelf of a
store like Best Buy, and let say that that computer
was made by Dell, and it has the Windows operating
(43:03):
system on it. Well, Dell doesn't make Windows. That's a
Microsoft product. So in this case, the computer you buy
is a Dell computer, but Microsoft is an O E.
M because that's the company that made the operating system
that this computer is using. Next, we've got O T T. Yeah,
you know me, this is over the top. That's what
(43:26):
O T T stands for, over the top. Now I
could get super silly on this and explain that over
the Top is a nineteen seven action film starring Sylvester
Stallone in which he plays a truck driver who competes
in professional arm wrestling tournaments and ultimately competes in a
tournament that will win him a new truck and the
love of his son. And yes, that is a real movie,
(43:47):
and I love it, and it is not good. It
is not a good movie, but I love it anyway.
And that's what O T T is in my heart.
But in tech, O T T actually stands for over
the top. In the case of a media service, So
the media service goes over the top of some other
traditional service like cable TV. So with O T T
(44:10):
you get media delivered over Internet connectivity as opposed to
something like a cable feed or satellite feed. So all
those streaming services like Disney Plus, Netflix, HBO, Max, Peacock,
Hulu and all the rest, all those count as O
T T services. Next, we've got P to the new
(44:32):
number two P so P the number two P that
stands for peer to peer, and in this case the
two is T O peer to peer. This is a
distributed approach to networking. The individual machines in a peer
to peer network are nodes that connect with each other,
and they can distribute workloads across the various nodes. This
(44:55):
is different from the traditional client server network because if
you had just a P or client server network, you
would have a centralized server that would then communicate with
each individual client. The clients in the client server network
would not communicate with each other. They wouldn't be like nodes.
They would just communicate with the server. They might be
(45:15):
able to communicate with each other using the server as
kind of a mediator, but they wouldn't directly connect to
each other. So and appeer to peer network. You can
have the nodes communicate directly with each other and work
directly with each other. That opens up all sorts of possibilities.
For example, in certain computational problems, you can have the
various computers on the p TWOP network lend a hand
(45:39):
and speed up the time it takes to solve that problem.
Or you can have p TWOP networks share files quickly
through the network itself. File sharing networks gave p t
P a really bad name in the late nineties and
early two thousand's. There is nothing wrong with sharing files
if you have the authority to do it, like if
you have the perm mission to share files, but a
(46:02):
lot of folks took the opportunity to use p t
P networks to distribute files that they didn't actually have
the rights to do that with, namely stuff like music
files and software. P TWOP allowed for the rapid sharing
of files across networks, uh exacerbated by organizations that specifically
made software that that prioritize that sort of stuff, and
(46:26):
that saw a spike in digital music privacy, which then
led to big media companies bringing the hammer down on
various people accused of pirating music files and it got
real ugly. But there's nothing inherently wrong or bad about
PTP networks. It's how you use a tool that makes
(46:46):
it good or bad in most cases. Anyway, all right,
that's enough for this episode. When we come back in
our next one. In this series, we will continue through
the ps and we still got probably two more episodes left.
I'm looking at I'm just looking at the list of
acronyms I have and feeling the weight of them on
(47:06):
my shoulders. But we we will get through them, and
then we'll move on to totally different types of topics.
And on that note, if you have suggestions for things
I should cover and tech stuff, reach out to me
on Twitter. A few of you have been doing that recently.
It's been awesome, and let me know what you would
like me to talk about. The Twitter handle for the
show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to
(47:29):
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my 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 my 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 of all things tech. And we are
back on the tech glossary topic, in which we look
(00:25):
at the various initialisms and acronyms used in the tech
world and figure out what they actually mean. In the
last episode, we worked up to I r C or
Internet Relay Chat. I made a joke that I can
get through all the eyes in that episode because I
can stands for Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers.
(00:46):
But I actually have a few more eyes to cover
before we move on, So I made a liar out
of myself. Let's do it, and we're gonna start with
I S d N that stands for Integrated Services Digital Network.
This requires a bit of a backstory. So way back
in the day, we only had what's called the plane
(01:08):
old telephone service or pots POTS, So that's kind of
a bonus acronym right there, and actually we still do
have that in some regard. But let's get back to
business here. Back before the nineteen sixties, all the telephone
connections depended upon actual interconnected physical wires and mechanical systems
(01:28):
and analog signals. So as more lines were joining the system,
and again these were analog signals passed over twisted pair
cables of wire, it became increasingly messy. Right as more
people and companies and places started to add phone lines,
it started to get to be a real mess and
(01:49):
analog systems were not great at supplying reliable long distance
communications service where you had to interconnect between different regional networks.
Around the nineteen fifties, the telephone companies began to work
on automating various systems and one potential solution, the one
that turned out to be the winner, was to migrate
(02:10):
from a purely analog telephone system to a voiceover digital
line system. Now that digital system also allowed for the
transmission of digital data, not just you know, voice, but
other types of information, and in the late nineteen eighties,
a part of the United Nations called the International Telecommunications
Union or i t U, another bonus initialism, began to
(02:34):
recommend the I s d N standard for data transmission
over phone lines. But there were actually two competing versions
of I S d N. There was not a standardized
version at first, that caused a lot of delays as
far as implementation and roll out, until a unified standard
emerged in the nineteen nineties, so I s d N
(02:56):
finally kind of entered the scene and allowed for faster
data transmission speeds or more accurately, greater data throughput. More
on that in a little bit, But before too long,
other technologies like DSL and cable modems would replace I
s d N. Now you still find I s d
N in some places, and I should probably do a
(03:16):
full episode about it in the future to really talk
about its development, its history, and its implementation. But these
episodes are already going far beyond what I expected, so
I will spare you. Let's move on. I SP This
is an easy one. It stands for Internet service provider.
These are the companies that provide Internet connectivity services to customers.
(03:38):
Those customers might be people, and they might be businesses
or other organizations or very organized people. I guess some
I s p s also offer other services, uh, usually
directly connected to Internet services, and uh, you know, some
other I s p s end up offering services that
are related to telecommunications. So, for example, there are I
(04:01):
s P s that might say, all right, well, if
you purchase service from us, not only will you have
Internet connectivity, will also give you an email address, we
will host a personal website for you. We might have
other software that you have access to. And then you've
got you know, things like cable companies that are also
(04:21):
I s p s, and they'll bundle Internet service with
cable TV or telephone service. You get the idea. It's
pretty common thing now. Back in the nineteen nineties, there
were around ten thousand I s p s in the world,
with the United States laying claim to more than half
of them. And if you've listened to my episodes on
earth Link, you heard me talk about one of those
(04:42):
I s p s. And these I s p s
frequently focused on specific regions, and hey, you know, the
Internet is a global thing. So these companies were relying
on bigger telecommunications companies to actually connect various you know,
computers together on the Internet. But telecommunications companies like telephone
companies and cable companies already had this infrastructure in place
(05:06):
to deliver services to customers that could easily be converted
over or added onto with the Internet speeds, so you
could have Internet be there in addition to the other
services you provided, and these regional I sp s just
couldn't match that, right, They just didn't have that that
kind of infrastructure. And so there are still regional I
(05:29):
s p s. They do exist, but they essentially sit
on top of these other larger telecommunication company I s
p s. And I bring this up because there may
be cases in the United States and which it looks
like you might have multiple I s P options in
your area, but it's probably that all of the smaller
ones are just piggybacking on the infrastructure of the big one.
(05:53):
So what they're doing is they're essentially leasing space, if
you want to think of it that way, on the
tele communication companies technology, and then they resell that to customers. Now,
the price that these regional I s p s get
isn't the same price that you would pay to have
Internet access. However, you might be paying more with the
(06:15):
regional I s P and they might try and make
it up make up for it with additional services like
those software packages I was talking about earlier. Okay, let's
move on I T. Okay. I included I T because
Jen Barber didn't know what it meant. And it means
information technology jen. The term originates from the late nineteen seventies,
(06:38):
which coincidentally marks the earliest days of the first personal computers,
and Miriam Webster defines it as quote the technology involving
the development, maintenance, and use of computer systems, software, and
networks for the processing and distribution of data end quote.
And that definition is a pretty broad one, and made
even larger with the era of big data, which necessitates
(07:03):
more robust networks and more sophisticated methods of data analysis.
And today we typically associate i T with networks in
general and the Internet in particular, but clearly the term
can apply to all sorts of computer systems. Okay, we're
killing it, let's keep moving. JPEG This stands for Joint
(07:23):
Photographic Experts Group, a joint committee that forms specifically for
the purposes of establishing standards for the coding of still pictures.
But when we use JPEG, we usually mean the file
format that this group created, not the group itself, So
we mean JPEG or JPG as a file extension of
(07:46):
file type. So the JPEG file format is an image file. Specifically,
it's a lossy compression file format, which means it's a
way to code still images, but you manage file size
by losing some of the data associated with that file.
Like a raw image file. If you were to take,
(08:06):
you know, a really nice digital camera and take a
photo of it, a raw image file is really really big,
and that could be a bit of a problem. With JPEG.
You compress that down, but you lose some of the
information in the process, and the higher the compression you choose,
the more data you have to lose in the process,
and as a result, the image will not look as good.
(08:29):
The more you compress it, the worst the image is
going to look, but the smaller the file size. There
was a need for this kind of file type because
the Internet in general, and the Web in particular, really
needed that in order to take off. Most of the
world was dependent upon dial up speeds in the early
days of the Web, and dial up speeds were not
(08:51):
terribly fast. Anyone who used a dial up modem to
log into say a bulletin board system back in the
nineteen eighties, before really the the dawn of the consumer Internet,
they know that it could take forever to download an image,
and by forever, I just mean like a crazy long
(09:12):
amount of time. But these compression formats like JPEG meant
that you could get images with smaller file sizes, which
meant faster download times for those files. This was also
important for stuff like email, which frequently has pretty strict
limits on how large a message can be before you
can send it out, like if it goes over that
(09:32):
you get that little annoying message saying you've exceeded the
the size allowed for sending out an email. The JPEG
standard took off like gangbusters and was a big part
of why the web itself was able to take off.
It allowed for an experience that incorporated more images, and
the committee introduced other JPEG standards later on, but the
(09:54):
original JPEG format was so popular that the subsequent standards
didn't really get much action, even though they had, you know,
arguably superior compression algorithms. Moving on, now we have a
trio here, and really it's just a an indication of
a whole series of things, which is kbps, mbps, and
(10:15):
g bps. These all referenced data throughput. Kbps is kill
a bits per second or thousands of bits per second,
mbps is megabits per second or millions of bits per second,
and g bps is gigabits per second or billions of
bits per second, and a bit is a single unit
(10:37):
of binary information. It's either a zero or a one,
so you can think of it kind of like a
physical switch that has two positions off or on. Sometimes
people confuse a word like mega bit with the word megabyte,
but a byte is actually eight bits. To go into
why this is would actually require a pretty long story race,
(11:00):
so I'll save that for a different episode. But it
is good to know that megabit and megabyte are two
different things. So if you have a connection and your
connection speed is one hundred megabits per second for downloads,
and then you go to download a file that's one
hundred megabytes, you have a hundred megabits per second. That
doesn't mean that you could download a hundred megabyte file
(11:22):
in one second. That that's different. Also, we tend to
think of this as download speeds, Like a one hundred
megabit per second connection is a faster connection than a
one kill a bit per second connection, but it's slower
than a hundred gigabit per second, which told be phenomenal.
But the way we're describing this as kind of inaccurate.
(11:45):
We use it this way, because it's how we experience
this by by figuring out how long it takes us
to transfer certain amounts of information over a connection. But really,
by and large, all the data traveling across networks is
moving at the same speed. I'm kind of oversimplifying, but
largely this is true. So in other words, if I
(12:05):
have a connection that is just fifty six kill a
bits per second, like I'm using a dial up modem
and I'm getting fifty six kill a bits per second download,
that's fifty six thousand bits per second. But you are
on a fiber connection, you're pulling down a gigabit per
second it's or one billion bits per second. While your
connection is better than mine, you're gonna get way more
(12:28):
data per second than I am. The actual speed of
the data traveling across these connections is pretty much the same.
It's just that your connection allows for way more data
to travel at that speed. The mind does. This is
easier to understand with an analogy. So let's say we've
got a really big room full of people, and all
(12:48):
the people in this room can walk at the same
top speed, and we'll say it's just three miles that's
their top speed of walking. We've got three doorways out
of this room. One doorway is wide enough just to
let one person through at a time, Doroy number two
is wide enough to let two people out at a time,
and Doroy number three is super wide. It allows twenty
(13:10):
people to leave at a time, shoulder to shoulder. Now
that last doorway is going to allow way more people
to exit the room in a given amount of time
than the other two would, But all the people are
still walking at that same top speed of three miles
per hour. So when someone says they have a fast
Internet connection, you can be that person to say, well, actually,
(13:33):
you have an Internet connection with a high data throughput,
and then you can probably escort yourself out of the
area because no one will want to be around you.
Trust me, I know this from experience. Here in the
United States, the national benchmark for broadband speeds is twenty
five megabits per second. That's twenty five megabits per second
(13:54):
download speed coming from the Internet to your device. In
other words, then it's three megabit per second up that's
going from your device up to the Internet. So it's
it's not the same coming down as it is going up.
For most Internet connections, it's not, you know, symmetrical. In
other words, it's asymmetrical. Well, we got that standard for
(14:16):
that benchmark here in the United States back in two
thousand fifteen. Before that, the US definition of broadband was
embrace yourself for megabits per second down one megabit per
second up. And I am not joking, and that is
pretty low. So with the twenty five megabits down three
megabits up benchmark for broadband, we learned in the US
(14:39):
from census data back in twenty nineteen that twenty three
of people in the US lack a wired broadband connection.
This has been the center of numerous political issues, including
the f c cs stance on whether or not it
has the authority to classify broadband internet as a utility
or something that is a basic right for all citizens.
(15:01):
That's something that is a It's an ongoing debate, and
it changes largely because the FCC itself changes every time
there's a change in an administration at the top of
US politics gets pretty complicated. Moving on, let's talk about
land and W. LAND So land or l a N
(15:22):
stands for local area network. This just refers to a
series of interconnected computer devices within a limited area. So
this could be as large as a college campus or
as small as a really cramped computer dorm room. It
doesn't all have to take place in colleges. But just
trust me on that last one. It's that counts as
a land. Now, the Internet is the network of networks,
(15:48):
but a land does not necessarily have to connect out
to the Internet. It can be self contained. So you
might create a land to work on stuff that probably
shouldn't be Internet accessible. That allows you to have what's
called an air gap, which means there's just no direct
link between that system and the Internet at large. Or
you might just have a land to facilitate a specific
(16:10):
type of computing. The example I always think about is
back in the nineties with the popularity of land parties
that referred to when geeks like me would go and
carry our computers with us to meet up with other geeks,
and then we would all link our computers together with
actual physical cables, or sometimes it would be gaming consoles
(16:31):
instead of computers, but you get what I'm saying, and
we'd link things together in order to play multiplayer games.
Because before internet broadband speeds made online gaming really feasible,
this was how we would you know the hoops we
jumped through in order to create a network to play
games like Descent and Duke Nukem three D against each other. Typically,
(16:53):
it's also how e sports tend to work. They use
local area networks so that one team or player doesn't
have a distinct advantage or disadvantage due to a difference
in paying times. A ping, by the way, refers to
a signal scent from one computer to another, typically like
a server, and then the return signal comes back, and
(17:14):
it's a way of measuring the lag between those two
connection points. And you don't want one team to be
a disadvantage just because they're they're ping was worse, because
that doesn't indicate whether they were better players or not,
or poorer players are not. So local area networks are
a way to kind of eliminate that, or at least
reduce it. A w land or w L a N
(17:39):
is surprise, surprise, a wireless land. So this is a
network that does the same thing as a local area network,
only without the physical cables. And like a land, a
w land doesn't necessarily have to connect out to the
Internet as a whole. It can, but it doesn't have
to these days, broadband speeds allow for on line and
(18:00):
even cloud based gaming and computational uses without the need
for land parties, though some folks will still go and
do them, and to be honest, nothing really replaces the
experience of, you know, going to a land party and
playing with or against other people in the same physical location,
where the talking of smack can become an art form.
(18:21):
It's typically also a little less um objectively terrible than
what you would find with online chat that is like
the worst, but in person it tends to not quite
get that extreme though I guess one downside is that
you can't easily mute another player that that player is
saying next to you and annoying the heck out of you,
(18:41):
unless you know, you happen to have some duct tape handy.
By the way, always carry duct tape. We've got more
to go, but I feel like we've picked up the
pace a little bit and when we come back, will
continue going down the alphabet, but first a quick break. Okay,
(19:02):
we're back, and now let's pick up with l c D.
This stands for liquid crystal display, which probably sounds a
little odd. After all, the general definition for a crystal
is that a crystal is a type of solid material
in which the constituent components are in a highly ordered structure,
like a lattice or scaffolding. So if you were to
(19:25):
take a piece of quartz or table salt and you
looked at it under a really powerful microscope, you would
see these this what looks like a fairly smooth surfaces
in fact made up of these repeated patterns of lattice
like structures that form the overall you know, solid substance.
(19:45):
But if crystal is a subset of solid materials, then
what the heck is a liquid crystal? How can you
have a liquid crystal? Well, we use the term liquid
crystals to describe stuff that as a state of matter
that has some elements of crystalline solid features and some
elements of a liquid material. So, in other words, you
(20:08):
might have a substance that, like a liquid, will take
on the shape of whatever container it's in, you know,
like a bowl of water. You wouldn't have a square
of water just sitting in the middle of a bowl,
though the water conforms to the shape of the bowl.
But if you were to look at that liquid under
a microscope, you would see that it's molecules are all
in a specific orientation, more like a crystalline structure. These
(20:30):
are really cool substances and they allow for all sorts
of neat applications. So with a liquid crystal display, these
crystals make images right, well, not exactly all right, So
there are liquid crystals that, when exposed to an electric current,
will change shape. There's a type called twisted pneumatics that
(20:50):
do this, and as the name suggests, these crystals have
a naturally twisted shape. But when you apply a current
to them, they will untwist to some degree, and the
degree to which they untwist depends upon the voltage of
that current. So by precisely controlling a voltage of a current,
you can then precisely control how much these liquid crystals
(21:13):
are able to untwist. And in addition, liquid crystals in
l c D s can transmit and change polarized light. Now,
a full discussion on what polarized light is and how
it works is well beyond this particular podcast episode, but
basically this means that through filters you can change the
orientation of light, and with l c D s you
(21:34):
can change which light is able to pass through into,
you know, a display or from a display to view,
and that determines what you see on that display. L
c D s require typically a backlight. There are some
that rely on reflective material, so it relies on light
from your environment hitting the display and then you see
(21:55):
the reflection. But with things like l c D monitors
and tell visions, we're talking about a backlit device, and
because of that, l c D s traditionally have limitations
when it comes to displaying a high contrast ratio. Contrast
refers to the difference between the brightest colors a display
can show versus the darkest colors it can show. And
(22:16):
because l c D monitors and televisions have a backlight,
that affects how dark you can get because there's always
a little bit of bleed through with light. The history
and tech of l c D s is truly fascinating stuff,
so I'll save that for a future episode. Next, we
have L E D and O l E D. Luckily,
(22:37):
we have some tech that frequently pops up when you're
talking about displays, and here we go, and L E
D is a light emitting diode and an O l
E D is an organic light emitting diode. So obviously
we need to define some stuff here, right, So first
of all, what in the blue blazes is a diode.
It is a component in electronics that acts as kind
(22:59):
of like a one way street for electrical current. So
a diode will allow current to pass in one direction,
but it will prevent it from going the opposite direction.
Diodes are one of the basic elements in circuitry and electronics,
and it's a type of semiconductor. And there's a lot
more to be said, but we can't spend all podcasts
(23:22):
talking about it. So an l e ED or light
emitting diode is a subset of diodes. So it allows
electricity or current rather to pass one way but not
the other. And as the name suggests, it's a diode
that emits light as current flows through it. Essentially, electrons
get pushed to higher energy levels, and when the electrons
(23:43):
are moving back down to their normal energy levels, they
have to release that excess energy and they do that
in the form of photons. You know, the particles of light.
L E d s don't need as much energy to
produce light as other light sources. They are far are
more energy efficient than say, incandescent bulbs. They're even more
(24:04):
energy efficient than fluorescent lights. They also last a lot
longer than either of those two types of lights, so
LED light bulbs are great though they tend to be
pretty expensive, particularly compared to fluorescence and the old incandescence,
but they last a lot longer and the amount of
energy they use is much lower, so switching to them
(24:25):
can save money over the long term. It's just that
upfront cost is a high one. And LED television uses
l e d s as the backlight source, and they
have great optical range and as I mentioned, they have
high energy efficiency which brings down the power consumption on
flat panel televisions that use L e d s. They've
been around since two thousand five, and they tend to
(24:47):
have better contrast ratios than your typical, you know, normal
l C D. Television's pre L e ED and organic
light emitting diode is an L e ED that contains
an organic compound on film, and that compound film is electroluminescent,
which means that lights up when current passes through it.
(25:08):
One of the many cool things about O l e
d s is that, since we're talking about a film,
you can actually create O l e D based displays
that are extremely thin and are in fact flexible. You
have to have the right electronics behind it that are
also flexible, but you can have flexible displays. So oh
lad displays have led to some really cool features, you know,
(25:31):
like bending TVs or curving TVs, or televisions that can
fold up or unfold or unrolled. Then smartphones as well,
we've seen some at least concepts of that. So these
malleable display technologies depend on oh lads, and most of
them cost more than my house did. Well, at least
(25:51):
that used to be the case. These days, you can
find oh LED televisions capable of displaying resolutions of four
K or higher starting at around dollars. That is not
chump change, I know, but it's still way less expensive
than the earliest oh LED TVs, which cost in the
tens of thousands of dollars when they first hit the market.
(26:15):
Moving on next, we have MAC. Mac is the name
of the fictional boxer in the punch Out series, but
it also stands for Media Access Control, and we typically
see it paired with the word address, giving us MAC address.
This refers to a unique identifier for a network interface
controller or n i C, so there's another bonus initialism.
(26:39):
This is used to identify a specific element connected to
a computer network, and it just takes a little thinking
to realize how this is necessary. Right, if you're connecting
various machines together in a network, you need some way
to identify every single device connected, or else you would
never know how to send information from one specific machineing
(27:00):
to another. It would be more like a giant party
line with all machines just broadcasting to the rest of
the network, and that would be chaos. You wouldn't know
who was saying what, and it would all be jumbled up.
It's bad enough to think about just in terms of communication,
but when you get to stuff like file transfers and
the like, it would just be untenable. So a MAC
(27:20):
address usually is something that is burned into a particular
network interface controller, So it's actually like a permanent thing
as part of a piece of hardware that connects as
part of the network um and it's determined by whatever
company manufactured that controller. So you could think of it
kind of like a serial number that's tattooed onto the controller,
(27:42):
and each tattoo is unique in that network. Now, sometimes
a MAC address is only mostly permanent, which means there
are actually some methods in which a person like a
network administrator could change a MAC address for a specific
piece of hardware. Now for the fun bit, these network
interface controller and their unique MAC addresses. These are necessary
(28:04):
within a single network. So let's say we've got two
n i c s connected inside Network A. They would
each need a unique MAC address or else nothing would work.
But let's say we've actually got two separate networks. We've
got network A and we've got network B. And we
find out that there's an n i C in Network
(28:24):
A and it has the exact same MAC address as
an n I C network B. Does everything fall apart?
Then nope. These unique MAC addresses are only necessary within
a single network. So when you have two different n
i c s connecting to separate networks, they can have
the same MAC address, no problem, there's no conflict there.
(28:45):
There's a lot more to say than that, but you know,
you know the old song and dance at this point.
MIDI is next. This is Musical Instrument Digital Interface m
I d I. This is one of my favorite technologies.
It's a technical ANDERD that is sort of like an umbrella.
So under this technical standard, you have specifications for digital
(29:06):
interfaces as well as the connectors that connect these various
digital interfaces to things like electric musical instruments and computers.
And you have a communications protocol, and this allows various
electronic audio and computer equipment to quote unquote talk to
each other. So a MIDI keyboard like a musical keyboard,
(29:28):
like a synthesizer, a synthesizer specifically with MIDI, that is,
with the right connectors, you could connect that directly to
a computer or to a digital audio station that in
turn connects to a computer. And it could be any
kind of computer as well. Like I always think of
big desktops because I think of the big like production
type stuff. But you can have a laptop, it could
(29:49):
be a smartphone, it could be a tablet. As long
as you have the compatible connectors that allow you to
insert that into the system, it would work. And the
MIDI protocol emerge in the nineteen eighties as electronic music
was really evolving, digital instruments and digital editing tools were
changing the industry. But that also meant there needed to
be some sort of standardized way to handle all this stuff,
(30:12):
or else we would again run into that problem where
you have a billion different proprietary formats that emerge, and
they make things difficult. Interestingly, MIDI does not transmit any
sort of audio signal. You may have listened to music
played back from a MIDI file, but that file doesn't
actually contain any sound. You can think of it more
(30:34):
as that file contains the description of sound instructions for
creating sound. So it's kind of like telling a system
you need to play this specific note at this specific
time for this long and with this an intonation and
with this amount of volume, the and through many an
(30:54):
engineer could change really really minute tiny things about digital recording,
how a note gets expressed. It's really neat stuff. This means,
by the way, that if you have a MIDI keyboard,
meaning a you know, like a musical keyboard that is
MIDI compliant, that keyboard has to have some other component
inside of it that actually generates the sound you could
(31:17):
create if you wanted to a purely MIDI keyboard without
that kind of component, but that would mean that if
you were to play that keyboard, you wouldn't actually be
generating any You couldn't like feed that to a speakers
or anything. It wouldn't create sound. I mean the only
sound you would get was that percussive sound of your
fingers hitting the keys, which kind of seems like it
(31:38):
would be a type of performance art that I would
really rather not sit through. One of the best analogies
I've seen, and I really wish that I had come
up with this one, is that MIDI is to digital
music the way old piano roles were for player pianos.
So a piano role doesn't generate sound on its own,
It only works when you put it through a player piano. Know.
(32:01):
The real beauty of this is how Middy allows for
the computational control of musical expression, which can come in
awfully handy if you're seeking out a particular sound and
vibe for a piece of music. Even if you don't
use the electronic digital version as your final product, it
might give you the feeling you want, so that when
(32:21):
you record it for real z s with you know,
quote unquote real musical instruments. I object to that phrase,
but some people use it. It means that then you
could replicate what you had created digitally. Now I've done
episodes about Mindy, so if you're interested in learning more,
be sure to do a search on the tech Stuff archives.
When we come back, we'll finish out the MS and
(32:44):
it's with a biggie. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay,
MP three and impact All right, here we go. MP
three stands for IMPEG Audio Layer three. But then that
(33:06):
raises the question of what the heck does IMPEG stand for?
And we got to get there. So IMPEG technically stands
for the Moving Picture Experts Group. So you remember earlier
in this episode about JPEG's and how that came out
of a subcommittee that was working on the digital coding
of still images. This is kind of similar, except IMPEG
(33:29):
brings together various working groups of engineers from different organizations
to create standardized ways to encode different kinds of media,
which includes, but is not exclusive to video. And that
gets a little confusing, right, I mean, you would think
that a group called the Moving Picture Experts Group would
be concerning itself only with moving pictures like a video.
(33:52):
The group came together in the late nineteen eighties, and
while the primary effort was in encoding video digitally, that
includes the necessity of encoding audio as well, because a
lot of video has audio associated with it, and encoding
also includes compression because raw media files like video and
audio are pretty darn big, like way too large to
(34:16):
transmit easily over network connections. Way back in the nineties,
those were slow connections and it just wasn't feasible. So
these working groups in this alliance innovated in ways to
code video and audio digitally in ways that computers can handle,
and to compress file sizes down so they weren't quite
so huge and you could actually transfer them from one
(34:39):
computer to another without it taking a week. I think
most folks when they use the word IMPEG, or rather
I guess the acronym IMPEG, they actually mean the file
extension IMPEG or MPG. This is just one of the
formats that this particular working group spawned. An IMPEG file
(35:00):
is a compressed video file format. Uh. It's one that
used either IMPEG one or IMPEG two file compression. But
these days most of the time we're talking about IMPEG
two because that's the type of file compression designed for
higher definition video. IMPEG one was like VHS level definition.
Because you gotta remember this was coming out in the
(35:22):
late eighties when VHS was still a thing, so not
very practical for today's video. It's the enhanced version of
IMPEG compression is IMPEG two. Some folks use IMPEG as
shorthand for just video file even if the video file
isn't an IMPEG format, so that can get a little confusing.
But then that raises the question what about MP three. Well,
(35:43):
that's a coding format specifically for digital audio, and it's
a lossy form of compression, which means that in the
process of compressing the audio file to a smaller size,
the protocol ditches some of the information from that original
raw audio file. So how does the MP three process
quote unquote know which information it should lose? And it's
(36:07):
all based on psychoacoustics, or how we perceive sound, and moreover,
which sounds might be beyond the scope of human hearing.
For example, because of our limitations in our perception, it
is very hard for us to hear a soft sound
that's played immediately after a very loud sound. So let's
(36:30):
say you've got a digital audio file and that has
a very soft sound played right after a really loud one.
The MP three compression algorithm essentially says, heck, no one's
gonna be able to hear this little soft sound anyway,
So we might as well lose it if you can't
hear it, it doesn't need to be there, and snip
that a little bit of data doesn't make it into
(36:52):
the compressed file. Similarly, there may be some sounds within
that digital audio recording that are below or above the
threshold of human hearing when it comes to pitch, so
we typically define this as consisting of tones between twenty hurts,
which is a very very low pitch, and twenty thousand hurts,
which is a very high pitch, and most folks start
(37:14):
to lose the ability to hear the higher pitches as
they age. This has led to some interesting technologies, such
as sounds designed to annoy young people that old people
can't hear, so it's used to help discourage loitering in
blazes like convenience stores. True Story and n P three
algorithm could trim away all frequencies that are identified as
(37:37):
being outside the scope of typical human hearing. The MP
three compression algorithm is kind of a sliding scale, so
you can set parameters as to how much you want
to compress the file size that in turn will affect
how drastically the algorithm will alter the raw audio, So
this can result in a compressed file that just doesn't
(37:58):
sound good. And there are plenty of audio files who
will just turn their noses up at lossy compression formats
like MP three no matter what level of compression you use,
and they prefer lossless file formats that keep all the
information there. And in some cases they have a point,
but in others, well, your own experience might vary drastically
(38:21):
from someone else's. My own hearing must be shot because,
at least in some cases, I have trouble telling the
difference between a decent MP three and a lossless audio
format of the same file played on the same set
of equipment. Moving on next, we have n f C.
(38:41):
This stands for near field communications and we're back on
more protocols. So in this case, we're talking about communications
protocols that allow for electronic communication between two devices that
are pretty darn close to each other. And by pretty
darn close, I mean they have to be at at
maximum four centimeters apart or one and a half inches.
(39:02):
You get beyond that and the NFC range doesn't work.
NFC allows for low throughput data exchanges, meaning you wouldn't
use NFC two, say, transfer a digital movie from a
computer to a smartphone or tablet. The protocols just don't
allow for that, at least not on any time scale
that would be convenient. Instead, NFC is meant to transfer
(39:26):
small bits of data for specific purposes. For example, you
might use an NFC enabled device to tap to pay
for something with a compatible payment system. You've got a
credit cards stored in your smartphone, your smartphone's got NFC chip.
The vendor you go to has an NFC pay area.
You just tap your phone to that and it makes
(39:48):
the little communications transfer and boom your set. There are
electronic ticket systems that use this kind of stuff where
you can use your phone as like an electronic ticket
to get into a venue and no one has to
scan a kee our code or anything like that. You
just tap your phone. NFC allows for the communication between
your device and the venue device, and boom, once it's authenticated,
(40:09):
you get to go in. That's the kind of stuff
that we're talking about here. And while you wouldn't use
NFC to transmit large files directly, you could use NFC
to facilitate some other type of connection between devices that
does allow for larger file transfers. So, for example, you
might be able to tap your phone against the computer
(40:31):
that happens to store, you know, like a particular digital
movie you want to transfer, and NFC might be used
to establish a wireless network link between your smartphone and
the computer, and then the movie would transfer over this
wireless network link. It wouldn't be using NFC itself to
do that. NFC would just be used to initiate that connection.
(40:52):
One popular example of NFC technology is the Ambo, a
collection of toys from Nintendo that use NFC chips to
allow the toys to connect with Nintendo game systems like
the Wii U and the Nintendo Switch. If you're not
familiar with these things, So there are these little toys
that have, you know, a flat base, so you might
(41:12):
have Mario or or Samus or think characters like that
link Zelda, so they're typically famous Nintendo characters. You buy
these toys and then on certain games with these systems,
you can bring the toy in close contact with the
game system, and doing so unlocks new features in the game,
(41:32):
which might mean that you can play as a new character,
or you unlock levels that you didn't have access to before,
or you get a new set of moves or equipment.
All sorts of stuff like that. It's a pretty neat
implementation of NFC technology. Other simple uses of NFC can
include anything from sharing information so it's like the equivalent
of exchanging business cards but you're doing it digitally, or
(41:57):
using an old mobile device to transfer settings to a
new one. So you buy a new phone, you bring
your new phone in close contact with your old phone.
Your old phone says this is how this owner likes things,
and your new phone immediately adopts those settings, so that
way your phone's already the way you like it. I've
done that multiple times with my various phones. Moving on,
(42:20):
we have o e M. This stands for original equipment manufacturer,
and typically we use o e M to describe a
company that's in the business of making components that are
used in the products of other companies. So, in other words,
and o e M is a type of company that
might make the circuit board you find in a particular
electronic device marketed by I don't know, let's say Atari.
(42:42):
So Atari makes the device, or at least markets and
sells it, but some of the components in that device
come from other companies O e M s. Sometimes this
gets a bit muddy. So, for example, let's say you
were to buy a computer off the shelf of a
store like Best Buy, and let say that that computer
was made by Dell, and it has the Windows operating
(43:03):
system on it. Well, Dell doesn't make Windows. That's a
Microsoft product. So in this case, the computer you buy
is a Dell computer, but Microsoft is an O E.
M because that's the company that made the operating system
that this computer is using. Next, we've got O T T. Yeah,
you know me, this is over the top. That's what
(43:26):
O T T stands for, over the top. Now I
could get super silly on this and explain that over
the Top is a nineteen seven action film starring Sylvester
Stallone in which he plays a truck driver who competes
in professional arm wrestling tournaments and ultimately competes in a
tournament that will win him a new truck and the
love of his son. And yes, that is a real movie,
(43:47):
and I love it, and it is not good. It
is not a good movie, but I love it anyway.
And that's what O T T is in my heart.
But in tech, O T T actually stands for over
the top. In the case of a media service, So
the media service goes over the top of some other
traditional service like cable TV. So with O T T
(44:10):
you get media delivered over Internet connectivity as opposed to
something like a cable feed or satellite feed. So all
those streaming services like Disney Plus, Netflix, HBO, Max, Peacock,
Hulu and all the rest, all those count as O
T T services. Next, we've got P to the new
(44:32):
number two P so P the number two P that
stands for peer to peer, and in this case the
two is T O peer to peer. This is a
distributed approach to networking. The individual machines in a peer
to peer network are nodes that connect with each other,
and they can distribute workloads across the various nodes. This
(44:55):
is different from the traditional client server network because if
you had just a P or client server network, you
would have a centralized server that would then communicate with
each individual client. The clients in the client server network
would not communicate with each other. They wouldn't be like nodes.
They would just communicate with the server. They might be
(45:15):
able to communicate with each other using the server as
kind of a mediator, but they wouldn't directly connect to
each other. So and appeer to peer network. You can
have the nodes communicate directly with each other and work
directly with each other. That opens up all sorts of possibilities.
For example, in certain computational problems, you can have the
various computers on the p TWOP network lend a hand
(45:39):
and speed up the time it takes to solve that problem.
Or you can have p TWOP networks share files quickly
through the network itself. File sharing networks gave p t
P a really bad name in the late nineties and
early two thousand's. There is nothing wrong with sharing files
if you have the authority to do it, like if
you have the perm mission to share files, but a
(46:02):
lot of folks took the opportunity to use p t
P networks to distribute files that they didn't actually have
the rights to do that with, namely stuff like music
files and software. P TWOP allowed for the rapid sharing
of files across networks, uh exacerbated by organizations that specifically
made software that that prioritize that sort of stuff, and
(46:26):
that saw a spike in digital music privacy, which then
led to big media companies bringing the hammer down on
various people accused of pirating music files and it got
real ugly. But there's nothing inherently wrong or bad about
PTP networks. It's how you use a tool that makes
(46:46):
it good or bad in most cases. Anyway, all right,
that's enough for this episode. When we come back in
our next one. In this series, we will continue through
the ps and we still got probably two more episodes left.
I'm looking at I'm just looking at the list of
acronyms I have and feeling the weight of them on
(47:06):
my shoulders. But we we will get through them, and
then we'll move on to totally different types of topics.
And on that note, if you have suggestions for things
I should cover and tech stuff, reach out to me
on Twitter. A few of you have been doing that recently.
It's been awesome, and let me know what you would
like me to talk about. The Twitter handle for the
show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to
(47:29):
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my 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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