June 28, 2021 • 48 mins
What's a PCB? What makes an RTF? What the heck is SaaS? We continue to demystify the acronyms and initialisms common in tech circles.
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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 for I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech end. Hey, we're back
with our tech Glossary series. We've made it up to
(00:26):
acronyms and initialisms that start with the letter P. This
is part five. So if you're joining me now and saying, hey,
the alphabet doesn't start with the letter P, that means
you should probably go back, you know, several episodes to
listen to the beginning of this series. So we're taking
lots of popular groupings of letters that you typically see
(00:46):
in tech, and we're explaining what those actually means. So
when you come across them, you'll say, oh, I know
what that stands for, and I know what it's for,
so let's get back to it. First up is pc B.
This means printed circuit board. Alright, So a circuit is
essentially a path for transmitting electric current, and you know,
(01:11):
typically we make circuits so that we can have electric
current do work for us in some way. For example,
a circuit might include a path that leads to a
light bulb that has an incandescent filament inside it. The
current flows through the path, flows into the light bulb
goes through that filament, causing it to heat up and
(01:32):
incandesce or give off light, and then the current continues
through to the end of the circuit, which is pretty simple. Now,
in the early days of circuitry, you would use conductive
wire to connect all the elements of your circuits. But
wires take up space, they can get tangled, they can
get disconnected. Uh, you would have to solder things. If
(01:53):
we could only depend upon the types of circuits that
you can build with like bread boards and stuff where
you're just learning, all of our electronics would be much
much larger, and again you would have to sauder stuff.
That's a very slow and painstaking process, especially when you
first start and you're not too sure of yourself, and
if you make a mistake, it really slows you down
(02:13):
even more. Then, in nine a guy named Charles Ducas
filed a patent for a design that served as a
foundation for modern circuits. What he did was he took
a wooden board and he used a stencil, and he
laid the stencil against the wooden board, and then he
attached conductive materials onto the board itself. Through this stincil.
(02:36):
The conductive materials served the same purpose as wires, but
it laid flat against the boards, which saved a lot
of space and hassle. Move forward a little more than
a decade, and in nineteen thirty six you had an
Austrian inventor named Paul Eisler who made the first actual
printed circuit board. While Ducas had stenciled conductive material to
(02:58):
a board, Eisler had experience with industrial printers that were
used in the publishing world, and he theorized that he
could use that same sort of technology to print a
circuit directly to a non conductive base. That's really important,
you know, do costed the same thing he used a
wooden board. Wood is non conductive. The material that the
(03:20):
circuit is built on top of has to be non conductive,
or else you can't channel where the current is supposed
to go. It'll just flow through all the conductive material.
So with modern PCBs we call this base the substrate.
Printing a circuit board solved tons of problems. For one thing,
as long as you design your circuit properly on the
(03:41):
front end, and as long as the printing equipment was
working as intended. You could print and reproduce your circuit
without having to be fussed about making a mistake. You
weren't in danger of soldering a wire to the wrong
contact or anything like that, so that was a huge
benefit to this approach. Paul Eisler's story is a really
(04:02):
dramatic one. There are a lot of trials and tribulations
and tragedy and triumphlets of alliteration there, and I may
have to dedicate a full episode to him in the
future because it's a pretty fascinating story. These days, PCBs
tend to be made by taking a non conductive substrate
then laminating a thin layer of copper foil to the surface. Now,
(04:24):
copper is conductive, so you might wonder, well, what gives
if you completely coat the surface with a copper coding
and well there's a following step which involves using chemicals
to etch the copper away. So what you do is
you coat the bits of copper you want to keep,
you know, the stuff that's actually going to serve as
the connective channels for your circuit components. So all the
(04:47):
circuit tree parts, you cote that with a protective chemical
you leave the rest of the copper uncovered. Then when
you introduced the chemicals to the circuit board, the chemicals
are only able to eat the exposed copper away. They
leave behind all the stuff that you've protected, and voila,
you've got your printed circuit board. You can also make
(05:09):
circuit boards with much smaller channels this way, using the
etching method, and you'll find PCBs in all sorts of
modern electronics. Computer motherboards are a type of PCB. Smartphones, radios,
DVD players, game consoles, cars, systems, tons of stuff have
printed circuit boards in them. It's pretty nifty. Okay. Moving
(05:30):
on p d A. Now, in tech this does not
refer to public displays of affection. And I'm not going
to make some sort of you know, crew joke about
how tech nerds don't have experience with that type of
p d A because that joke is old and tired
and not accurate, thank you very much. It's in fact
(05:51):
so old and tired that it's even more old and
tired than I am. And that's saying something. But no,
a p d A in this context is a personal
digital assistant, which is more or less just a handheld computer.
These devices predated the smartphone. One way to describe a
traditional p d A is to say it was kind
of like a smartphone without the phone part. In the
(06:14):
old days, you would have your p d A and
you would use a cable or a docking station to
sinc the pd A to a computer, and software running
on your computer would interact with the doct p d
A and transfer over information like contacts, new email documents,
et cetera. This could go both ways. The p d
A could end up adding new context to your database
(06:36):
on your computer, and that way you would have access
to this information on the go while your computer remained
packed up or back at the office. They were really
just an electronic version of the old pen and paper
schedulers and appointment calendars that you know, organized people relied upon.
While you could make a decent argument that the nineteen
(06:57):
four British made handheld computer called the Ion Organizer counts
as a p d A, I think most folks would
really point to the early nineteen nineties when talking about
the earliest p d A s and we get the
term personal digital assistant from Apple and the infamous Apple
Newton in Two Apples. Then CEO John Scully, someone who
(07:21):
is frequently reviled in the history of Apple, revealed the
Newton at C E S and yeah, back in the day,
way back in the day, Apple would actually attend C
E S. How how times have changed. The Newton was
to have handwriting recognition technology, and it would allow people
to write notes down on a digital screen using a
special stylus, and the Newton would then, in theory, convert
(07:45):
the handwritten stuff you put on the screen into text
and you would have an electronic copy of your notes. Now,
some technical shortcomings gave Newton a bad name early on,
though Apple would continue to work on the technology and
improve it. However, our first impressions are really hard to shake,
and generally speaking, the Apple Newton became something of a joke,
(08:05):
literally in the case of a Simpsons episode. But many
other companies introduced PDAs over the years. One of the
big ones was Palm, and over time companies would build
in capabilities to allow PDAs to connect directly to the Internet,
removing the necessity to dock a p d A with
a computer to transfer information to the p d A.
(08:26):
For the most part, smartphones have replaced p d A s.
As you know smartphone apps replicate the various functions found
in those old devices. But it was a pretty darn
good run. It's just a short one, and I've heard
some folks, including myself, use p d A to refer
to stuff like Sirie, Google Assistant, and Alexa. But I
(08:46):
suspect this is not super accurate and that I am
guilty of perpetuating a misunderstanding, for which I apologize. I
think the generally accepted terms for those kind of things
are smart assistant or virtual assistant, and sometimes just personal assistant,
So I will try to remember not to use personal
(09:07):
digital assistant when referring to stuff like Siri. Next up
p d F. This stands for Portable Document Format. So
the company Adobe developed the PDF format to address a problem.
Let's say that you are working on electronic document and
a word processing program on a PC, and that this
(09:29):
is back in the early nineties, and you want to
send this document to someone else for them to review it.
But that person uses a Mac computer and the Mac
computer is not compatible with the file formats that your
PC based word processing program generates. So what do you do?
Adobe solution was creating a file type that isn't tied
(09:49):
to a specific operating system or a type of hardware,
or a type of word processing or you know, productivity software.
It was, however, proprietary to Adobe nearly two decades before
the company released it as an open standard in two
thousand eight. The original concept was that you would create
a document with whichever software you were reliant upon and
(10:11):
on whatever type of computer you happen to own. Then
you would convert that document to the PDF format, which
effectively captured the document in its final state. Then you
could send that BDF to whomever you needed to and
they would be able to view it on whatever type
of machine they used. However, you did need a special
(10:32):
PDF viewer to look at those documents, at least initially.
The file sizes could get quite big as well, uh
larger than the native file formats you were working with.
So let's say you were making a word document then
you converted it to PDF. You would see that the
PDF file might be much larger than the word file,
and they weren't meant to be edited, so making changes
(10:54):
to a PDF file wasn't really meant to be a thing.
A b DF is kind of more like an image
than a document file. It's more like a picture of
a document. It is possible to edit them these days,
either directly using Adobe products or using software like Microsoft
Word or the cloud based Google Drive suite. And when
(11:15):
creating PDFs, you can make some fields interactive, which allows
people to place digital signatures on files and that kind
of thing, or you know, check boxes in a checklist.
But one thing that I think is important to remember
is that PDF files can sometimes also be hosts to malware.
Because PDFs can hold embedded code, including hyperlinks or those
(11:36):
interactive fields, it is possible to embed malware within a
PDF itself, so it's always good to keep your antivirus
software up to date. It's also a good idea to
scan your files if you aren't confident that they came
from a safe source, or just not open them at
all if you aren't you know, sure of where they
came from. This is a good rule in general. Next,
(11:59):
we've U P HP and originally this initialism stood for
personal home page, but now it doesn't. It's kind of
like how MTV used to stand for Music Television but
now it's just MTV, or how AMC used to be
American Movie Classics, but now it's just a MC p
HP is a type of scripting language used in web development.
(12:22):
It's an open source language and it can be embedded
into HTML, which is hypertext markup language. We covered that
in a previous episode in this series. PHP code executes
on the server side of things, and it can be
used to make dynamic web content, meaning content that actually
changes either because of an interaction that happens on a
(12:44):
web page or it just is able to change over time.
This is a good time for us to kind of
reflect and remember the old old days of the web.
So back when the World Wide Web was very young,
it took a pretty good amount of work to make
a web page. You might use a document program. For instance,
I used just a very simple text editor program to
(13:06):
build out a page in HTML before then uploading the
code to a server. Then you would hop on over
onto a web browser and see what the results were
of your hard work and whether or not you laid
out your page correctly or if in fact you were
going to have to go back into that text editor
and make some changes to your HTML code. It was
(13:28):
a fairly slow process and because of that, and because
HTML initially didn't really support dynamic elements, it would mean
that most web pages you encountered would be static. That is,
each web page was sort of a stable document and
it didn't change. So if you visited someone's web page,
there wasn't real really much point in visiting it again.
(13:51):
I mean, it's just it's going to be the same page.
You could click on links and stuff and go to
other you know, web pages or documents or whatever, but
what you saw on the web page was going to
remain the same over time. PHP is one of the
scripting languages that allows developers to create web pages that
are not static, but they can update or change in
real time. Dynamic scripting allows for stuff like posting comments
(14:14):
on a page and having them show up. That's one
of the simplest versions I could think of. Dynamic elements
allow for stuff like e commerce. Without it, businesses web
page might be nothing more than the electronic equivalent of
an advertising flyer, you know, maybe giving a perspective customer
and email address to write to or a phone number
(14:34):
to call. As I record this. PHP version eight point
one point oh Alpha two is in early testing. It
is not yet ready for production, but it is a
scripting language that continues to receive updates, so that's kind
of cool. Okay, we've got a lot more letters of
the alphabet to get through. Let's take a quick break,
(15:04):
all right. Next up, we've got p n G, or
portable network Graphics. Some people pronounce it as ping, which
is somewhat confusing because ping is something else. A ping
in tech typically is when you're talking about a signal
that's sent from a client to a server to wait
for a response and find out how much latency there
(15:26):
is between the two connections, so you know how much
of a delay there is between the two. That's not
what this gonna ping is. P n G is a
graphics file format that supports lossless data compression, So that
means it uses a method to compress file sizes that
does not discard information about the file itself. When you
view the image, you get all the information from the original.
(15:49):
This makes it similar to the GIF file format or
or jeff if you insist on being wrong. Uh. And
this is in contrast with the JPEG format. Jpeg uses
a lossy form of compression. Now, the PM format can
compress down further than a GIFT can, and that means
that many of the images on the web these days
(16:10):
are actually PM files not GIF files. Greater compression means
you get smaller file sizes. That means faster loading times
when you're visiting a web page. It also means less
bandwidth usage, so there are a lot of benefits to it.
The group that developed PNG aimed to create a format
that would allow for better color recreation, and also to
(16:31):
make a format that wouldn't be covered under a patent.
That would mean that people and companies would actually be
able to use this new format without having to apply
for a license from a patent holder in order to
do so. The format also allows control of opacity and transparency,
which is quite handy. This is what allows people to
make images that lay right on top of a background
(16:53):
without having that irritating block of white around the image,
you know, kind of like a canvas or frame. And
with aacity control, it's possible to make parts of the
image transparent and parts of it opaque. That could come
in pretty handy depending upon what effect you're striving for.
Moving on, we've got raid. It's not a not an
(17:15):
insect aside in this case, here's an acronym that actually
has two similar full names and they both mean the
same thing. So another example of this in this series
was digital versatile disc and digital video disc. Both of
those mean DVD. They're both for the same thing. It's
just that digital versatile disc is the quote unquote official
(17:35):
name for it. Anyway. A RAID is either a redundant
array of independent discs or a redundant array of inexpensive discs.
And it's a very practical solution to some pretty common problems.
Problem no one technology breaks and I'm sure we've all
(17:55):
experienced this. Maybe your computer keeps crashing, maybe your car
are won't start, maybe the washing machine starts making this weird,
high pitched sound and then it just gives up. The
ghost stuff breaks down thanks a lot in tropy stupid
laws of the universe. But what if you happen to
be reliant on digital information, like that's the basis of
(18:19):
your business or some endeavor you're pursuing, and if access
to the digital information went away, you would be up
the proverbial poopy creek without a paddle. That would be
what we call in the tech business, a bad thing.
So you'd probably want to store the information in a
(18:39):
couple of different places so that if one of those
things fails, you would still have it somewhere else. In fact,
some of us do this in our day to day
lives without even having it ever touched tech. I know
I have written down the same thing a few times
in different places so that I can make sure I
had access to it. This is called redundancy, the practice
(19:02):
of having backups so that you're not at a loss
if your primary system should fail. And then there's the
word inexpensive. That's also important. Sure, you could create a
system in which you were using the top of the
line equipment with the fastest processors and all of that
kind of stuff. But if what you're really just trying
(19:22):
to do is store some information, then going with that
sort of bleeding edge technology would be a really big waste.
It would just be throwing way too much hardware at
something that didn't need that as a solution. What you
really need is something that's reliable, but it doesn't have
to be the best of the best. You just need
something that's going to work when you need it to.
(19:43):
And even then you can start tweaking these settings a
little bit, right Like, you can think of this like
sliders on a control board. Maybe you've got one slider
that's labeled cost and you've got a second slider that's
labeled reliability, and their linked to each other. And the
more rely will the tech, the more expensive it is.
And in fact, the cost might increase faster than the
(20:04):
reliability does. So maybe when you're at you know, level three,
cost is three and reliability is three. But if you
move reliability up to five, suddenly cost is six and
reliability is five. Move reliability up to seven, cost is ten.
You see what I'm saying, Like, costs can get higher
faster than you actually see an increased reliability. But maybe
(20:27):
you find a sweet spot somewhere that because the cost
is at a certain level, you can have several redundant
systems to support each service, and yeah they're not the
most reliable, but the reliable enough you might see some failures,
but you would save money on the far end of
(20:47):
it because the cheaper systems work well enough that you
didn't have to shell out the big, big bucks for
the more expensive ones. So it becomes this sort of
risk analysis kind of thing. You figure out, well, how
likely is any system to go down at any given time,
how many backups do I need to make sure that
that is not a problem, and how expensive will it be,
(21:08):
and generally speaking, you can go for some pretty cheap stuff.
Big data centers use RAID servers to handle data through virtualization.
Now that refers to using computer software to build out
a virtual machine that relies on actual physical hardware but
isn't necessarily tied to a single device. You can have
a computer running one or more virtual machines, or you
(21:32):
can have virtual machines that are kind of distributed across
multiple computers. Using virtualization and RAID architecture, companies can have
high performance, reliable systems and not freak out should part
of it go down. And I'm pretty sure just about
every cloud service out there relies on RAID implementations. There
are different ways to handle the redundancy aspect, but the
(21:54):
goal is always the same to provide a way to
ensure service is not going to get interrupted even in
the event of a catastrophic failure of one system. Like
let's say that a server just breaks down entirely, maybe
it's power supply goes bad. Others can then end up
taking on the load because they are redundant systems. Now,
(22:14):
there there are other things that can go wrong and
they can interrupt service, like if the communication lines out
to the general Internet are broken. Well, it doesn't matter
how many redundant systems you have, right if your communication
channel is cut, then you don't have any way of communicating.
So there are other things that can go wrong, but
at least on this particular end of the system, you
(22:36):
have some failsafe measures. There's a lot more that could
be said about RAID systems. I could go into a
lot more detail, but I'm gonna save that for a
full episode in the future at some point. Next up,
we got RAM and DRAM and stram and RAM, or
rather r A M d R A M S d
R A M v R A M, etcetera. So welcome
(22:57):
to the many flavors of random access memory. That's what
RAMS stands for. I would call it random access memories,
but that's a daft punk album, which is awesome of course,
But that's not what I need to cover today. First,
let's talk about computer memory in general. So computers, when
you boil them down, uh, but you know, don't boil
(23:18):
them down. That will invalidate your warranty anyway. Computers are
machines that take data, they perform some type of operation
on that data, and they produce output based on the
outcome of that process. Now, the data needs to come
from somewhere. It could come directly from input, like you know,
(23:39):
a switch being thrown, or a key being pressed or
a button being pushed, or a computer might pull data
from a long term storage solution such as a hard disk.
But to work quickly and efficiently, computers need a way
to store at least some information temporarily in order to
refer back to that. And sometimes techno nerds like me
(23:59):
will use analogy of long term versus short term memory
with humans. Data stored on a hard drive is more
like long term memory, it's there for the long haul,
but RAM is more like short term memory. Like if
someone tells you, hey, just so you know, you need
to push on that door to open it. You've got
the information stored in short term memory, and you can
(24:21):
use that info when you go up to the door,
but you don't necessarily need it forever, right like, if
you're only going through that door once, you really just
need that information long enough to not make you look
like a weirdo as you are pulling very hard on
a door that's meant to be pushed. Now, beyond this
little surface level, this analogy starts to break down. So
(24:41):
we're gonna shift a bit. We're not gonna you know,
it's not exactly the same. It's not apples to apples.
Computer memory represents a way for a computer to reference
information quickly without seeking it in long term storage and
random access memory is dynamic, meaning it can be read
from or chain to buy the computer without a problem.
(25:02):
It can also be accessed in any order, which gives
the computer a quick ability to go straight to the
bit of data in the memory that's necessary, that's needed
for whatever is going on, without having to read through
all the data in random axis memory. To use another analogy,
let's say that you're told to find the specific quote
there was only one catch, and that was catch twenty
(25:24):
two from the novel catch twenty two. But you're not
giving any information about where in the novel that quote appears.
You would probably start from the very beginning of the
book and start scanning the novel line by line looking
for that quote, which is time consuming. But let's say
instead you have a reference that gives you the chapter
(25:45):
and page number, and it tells you to look in
chapter five to find this quote. Now you can skip
right over chapters one through four, you can go to
where the info you need happens to be. That's kind
of like how RAM works. The computer doesn't have to
scan through the entirety of what's in this dynamic memory
to find what it needs. RAM can also be volatile,
meaning that if you were to turn off your computer,
(26:07):
the information stored within the machines RAM gets wiped out.
RAM is really only important for helping to do the
things that you're actually doing on the computer right then
and there, so it doesn't need to get etched in
stone or anything. You've got long term storage for that
kind of thing. That's RAM in a nutshell. But let's
talk about these other flavors really quickly, and this is
(26:29):
just a very high level I'm not going to dive
into each of these. That would take way too long.
So d RAM stands for dynamic random access memory and
s d RAM is a subtype of that. It's called
synchronous dynamic random access memory. There's also d d R
s d RAM, which at first I thought was dance
(26:50):
Dance Revolution s d RAM, but no. In fact, d
d R stands for it double data rate. Now, generally speaking,
these behave very much in the same way as RAM,
but with improved efficiency and speed for certain applications and implementation.
So it's you could say, it's RAM but better. D
(27:10):
RAM requires more power and generates more heat than your
run of the mill RAM does, however, so there are
tradeoffs here. Then we've got v RAM. This is video RAM,
which is a variant of dynamic RAM, and it used
to be a popular way to help buffer frames and
graphics cards so that you would have a smooth experience
running graphic intensive applications like you know, like video games.
(27:34):
It's not really used anymore, however. It's essentially been replaced
by s d RAM, which eventually got good enough so
that we didn't need a specialized video RAM anymore. Next,
we have our f C. The stands for request for comments.
It's also a pretty misleading term these days, but back
in the old days, and RFC really was more of
(27:57):
a request for comments than it is today, and it
was all in an effort to initiate a dialogue about
how to set up the systems that one day would
be the the stuff that powers the Internet. Alright, so,
way back in the nineteen sixties, you had a group
of researchers and engineers and scientists who are working for
the Department of Defense in an effort to build out
(28:19):
networking technology UH and ultimately to create what was called
ARPA Net. In the ARPA Net project, it wasn't practical
to have everyone present at every working group meeting in
order to hash out the various protocols and approaches and
even philosophies that the group would initiate in order to
make computer and networking reality. However, there was also kind
(28:41):
of a general desire not to create an environment in
which maybe one small working group, for example, makes some
sort of declarative proclamation of this is how it must
be so the RFC approach, and which researchers would circulate
a proposed set of specifications or protocols or whatever, would
(29:03):
allow others to chime in and make suggestions or ask
for clarification. The goal was to make better systems through
this kind of collaborative approach, and not to have any
one working group dominate the process. Now, over time, these
documents became less about bringing an input and more about
just circulating technical information about the Internet, including the actual
(29:23):
infrastructure of computer networks, the protocols used by machines to
communicate with one another, and even more general concepts related
to networking. It's more about providing a series of technical
documents that explain the underpinnings of networks in general and
the Internet in particular, rather than encouraging some form of
group discussion. Once published, and RFC never changes, it is
(29:48):
not edited, it is not updated. This means that sometimes
there are errors in an RFC, then that means they're
there forever. The I E. T F one of the
organizations that oversee these r f c s. It does
have a way for people to report errors and it
does keep track of all errata. Next up is r
F I D. This stands for radio frequency identification. It's
(30:13):
actually a subset of automatic identification and data capture or
a I D C technologies. Now, generally speaking, these technologies
involved systems that allow for automatic detection of something specific,
and it includes identifying those specific things and then collecting
data about those specific things and maybe even incorporating that
(30:35):
data into databases without the need for a human operator.
It can all be on the automated side of things.
And I'm sure you've interacted with r F I D
tags before, and r F I D tag has the
information coded directly into it. So the r f I
D tag itself is an integrated circuit and it can
be a really thin and flexible one. Even it can
(30:56):
be in tags and stuff that are flexible. Uh this
sort it also includes an antenna. Now, most r f
I D chips are passive r f I D chips,
which means they don't have any power on their own.
They don't broadcast or anything like that. They are just there. However,
when they are brought within the broadcast reach of a
(31:18):
of an r f I D reader, which is essentially
broadcasting radio waves of a certain frequency, things change. The
r f I D tags antenna will pick up on
those radio waves which passed through the antenna, and then
it'll turn into essentially electricity. The whole process for that
is one I've covered several times in tech stuff. But
(31:39):
the energy goes into the passive chip that modulates the
signal and then broadcasts the modulated signal back out which
the reader can pick up on. That gives the reader
whatever information was hard coded into that r f I
D and that information can be lots of different stuff.
In fact, there are a lot of security systems that
use this sort of approach. You get badges that are
(32:02):
containing thin r f I D chips inside them and
the r f I D m the badge has a
identification in it that should match up to a database
of authorized personnel. Okay, so you walk up to a
door and it has an r f I D reader
next to it. That's your little badge reader. You hold
the badge up. The r f I D reader is
(32:24):
constantly sending out this low power radio signal. The r
f I D chip inside your badge detects the signal,
it goes through the antenna. It creates this modulated frequency
that gets sent back the reader picks up on. That
compares your badge to a database of authorized users. If
(32:45):
you show up on that boom, you get in. If
you don't show up on that, the door stays locked.
There are also active r f I D chips. These
are chips that actually require a battery. They have to
have a power source because these chips do constantly broadcast
out information that can be picked up by readers. They
also tend to be bulk here because they require a
(33:06):
power source, they're more expensive, and they're not really necessary
for a lot of the applications that we typically use.
R F I D four. Okay, it's time for another break.
But when we come back, we will continue down the
RS like a pirate. Next up is r G B
(33:30):
and this stands for red, green, and blue. It's an
additive color model. That means it's a color model in
which you can create different colors by adding different amounts
or intensities of the three primary colors of the model together.
In this case red, green, and blue. So to get white,
you would add all three together. And this works when
(33:50):
you're talking about light, right, when you're talking about wavelengths
of light, because essentially you're adding wavelengths together. If you
remember from the color spectrum, know that it's not just
that it goes from red to orange, to yellow, to green,
to blue, to indigo to violet, but that the wavelength
of light for each of those bands is different with
(34:11):
with it getting smaller as you get further into the spectrum.
So red wavelengths have the longest wavelengths and then violet
has the shortest. And UM. Yeah, by adding different lights together,
you're essentially adding the wavelengths together, and you can adjust
the color that way. This UM this really only works
(34:32):
when you're talking about light. If you're using physical dyes
like actual paint or something. If you were to keep
mixing all the colors together, then you would end up
with black or really just a really dark, unpleasant color.
So it doesn't work with that approach. It only works
really with light display technologies rely on the r GB
(34:52):
color model. Older displays had cables and and and ports
for composite signals. That was not as nice like that's
where these different light sources would be merged together before
being sent to a display. But by keeping these signals
separate in their red, green, and blue colors, our GB
(35:14):
displays can combine them into a better quality image. That
was a short one. Let's move on. How about r
I s C or RISK. This actually stands for reduced
instruction set computer. So your typical computer is a general
purpose device, which means it needs to be able to
do a little bit of everything. But in order for
(35:36):
a machine to be capable of doing a bit of everything,
you have to make certain sacrifices when it comes to
stuff like speed and efficiency. If you were to optimize
a machine for a subset of routines, you might make
it perform at you know, a lower rate for anything
outside of those routines, but anything that fell into its
(35:57):
wheelhouse it could do really, really well. So when you're
making a general purpose machine, you might just bite the
bullet and create a system that can handle pretty much
everything but isn't really optimized for anything. In particular. Risk, however,
relies on highly optimized instruction sets. So let's say you
want to build out a system that would really focus
(36:18):
on something specific like video processing. This task doesn't require
your system to also be good at other stuff. It
just needs to be wicked good at processing video, So
you architect a system that optimizes everything towards video production. Now,
if you want to use the system to process videos,
(36:39):
it's really fast, much faster than a general purpose computer
would be. In fact, you can have an optimized video
processing station that's faster than a general purpose computer, even
if that general purpose computer technically has better hardware in it,
like a better processor, because optimization can go a really
long way. But another way to look at it is
(37:01):
just in how processors complete instructions. So the opposite of
an R I s C machine is a C I
s C, or complex instruction set computer. A complex instruction
might involve lots of individual steps per instruction, and a
a c I s C or CISK CPU would understand that.
(37:24):
You would understand, oh, this one instruction involves multiple steps,
and would execute those steps to complete the task. For
an r I s C system, first you would have
to break down those steps into simpler instructions, and depending
on the task, the r I s C machine might
complete the overall effort faster than the C I s
(37:46):
C machine. But if the task means that the RISK
system is having to break down lots of complex instructions
into simpler ones, the CISC machine wins out. So it's
all dependent upon what applications you're trying to run. You
can think of RISK machines as needing instructions to be
broken down to their most basic level before it can
(38:06):
execute them, whereas a CISCU machine can take a more
general set of instructions and get to work. So there's
not really one that's better than the other. It's all
dependent upon how you're using them and how they've been optimized.
Next up, we've got ROM. This stands for read only memory. Now,
(38:27):
remember when we talked about RAM and how that kind
of memory is volatile. I mean, once you shut down
a machine, the information in RAM goes away. Well. ROM
is non volatile. It is hard coded, so ROM includes
hard coded instructions that persist whether the computer is on
or not. Also, as the describer read only suggests, this
(38:50):
type of memory cannot be changed under normal circumstances. You
can read from this, but you cannot write to it.
And if you're an old Fogy like me, you might
remember the days of home video game consoles that took cartridges.
The cartridges actually had printed circuit boards inside them, and
(39:11):
these were ROMs. The game everything from the graphics to
the instructions on how the console should respond to player input,
to the music, you know, everything that made the game
the game was printed on the circuit boards. They were
unchangeable unless you were to like break open the cartridge
and get the old soldering iron out and make some
(39:32):
changes by hand, which is not recommended by the way.
So the stuff that goes into ROM typically includes the
instructions the computer needs to start up. It's kind of
like the basic information the computer uses in the booting process,
and that's why you wouldn't really want to be able
to change it. Next up, we have r t F
that stands for Rich Text Format which is a proprietary
(39:54):
document format from Microsoft. The company introduced this format in
then with the intent for it to be kind of
a step up from plain old text files. So unlike
you know, the the older text files, the RTF format
can actually hold some extra information that text files can't,
(40:16):
including stuff like font style you don't get that with
regular text files, or how to incorporate images is another
feature that you don't find in text files. Now, it's
nowhere near as feature full as like you know, a
word document from Microsoft would be. However, lots of different
apps and programs can open r t F files, but
(40:37):
they can't open word files. So if you need to
type up a document but you couldn't be certain that
the people you were going to share this document with
had word you might go with r TF. Microsoft ended
development of r TF back in two thousand eight. Now
that doesn't mean the format disappeared. Many word processing apps
still support it because of that universality. You might open
(40:59):
a file using one word processing program, make some changes
to it, save it back as r TF, then open
that same file but using a totally different computer with
a different operating system and a different word processing program.
In order to continue so it still has its uses,
though with the growth of cloud based solutions, it's not
quite as relevant as it used to be. Next, we
(41:22):
have S A A S, big S, little, A little,
A big S, and this ties right into what we
were just talking about. S A A S stands for
software as a service, and this marks a different approach
to the software business from the old days. So let's
talk about those old days and about how we moved
from product to service. All right, So it's the early
(41:46):
nineteen eighties and you just bought your first personal computer
and you're so excited, and you're gonna go shopping for
some software that you want on your new PC. And
you want to use this PC to do some productivity work.
So you invest in a word processing program and a
spreadsheet program and maybe a few other applications. You purchase
each of these from some software company, maybe all of
(42:09):
them come from the same company, and each program has
a set price, so you pay the price and boom,
the program is yours to install on your computer, and
the transaction is over. That's it. You've got it. Now.
Over time, maybe the software company releases new versions of
those programs with you know, more features and stuff and
(42:30):
if you want to be able to use those features,
you would need to go out and buy the new
version of this program and then install that on your computer. However,
each purchase would be its own discrete event. You buy it,
you install it, it's yours. Now let's take a little
step forward. Let's say that you start to run a
(42:51):
small office and you want each of your employees to
have a computer that's running a certain suite of software.
You might make an arrangement with big company like Microsoft
to get a license for multiple copies of software. Because
you're not supposed to just buy one copy of a
program and then install it on five or ten computers
or whatever. Companies actually developed ways to prevent users from
(43:15):
doing that. There are penalties if you try and work
around it. So now you get a license to use
a certain number of installations of software. It's a little
bit different from before. But let's take another step forward. Now,
Let's say you're running an office and you find that
there's a company that's offering a suite of productivity solutions
that are running over the cloud. So the actual applications
(43:38):
like the word processor and the spreadsheet program, they're all
running on servers on the Internet. They're not running on
your own computers. You use the Internet to connect to
those services. So instead of installing software to your machines,
you use some form of client software to access them,
which is probably just a web browser. Rather than purchasing
the software outright, you're paying a subscription fee in order
(44:01):
to access the software. There are pros and cons to this.
As a user, the big con, as I guess you
can spot right off the bat, is that you're not
just making a single purchase and then that's the end
of the transaction. Instead, you have this recurring subscription fee,
so you continue to pay for the product as you
(44:22):
use it, or as I should say, you continue to
pay for the service as you use it. But on
the pro side of things, with software as a service,
you can expect to benefit from improvements to the software
over time. You know, in the old days, like I said,
you would have to purchase a new version of the
software when the company would release it if you wanted
those features. Instead, with software as a service, you get
(44:45):
those benefits as the company that provides the service improves
the cloud based software. So as long as you're a subscriber,
you get access to those new features that means no
more having to upgrade all of your offices copies of
say Microsoft off this every few years. Instead, you just
subscribe to this software as a service and you get
the new features as they are implemented. The other big
(45:09):
benefit to software as a service is that you might
be able to access the software with any compatible machine
as long as you have your log in credentials. So,
in other words, you don't have to worry if this
new computer has the software loaded onto it. We're not
as long as it has web browser or you know,
whatever the client is to access the service. It makes
the software way more flexible and portable because you, as
(45:32):
a user, can access it with any compatible network connected device.
So let's say that I forgot my work computer at
the office I accidentally left it there. Well, fortunately, because
we're using a lot of cloud based productivity software, I
could use my home computer and log into my account
(45:53):
via the cloud and get access to all of my notes,
all of my scripts, everything like that. Uh, because I'm
able to access it through this cloud based service as
opposed to it having a native application running on just
my office computer. For companies like Microsoft, this approach is
(46:14):
crazy profitable, like profit margin, so from a revenue sense,
it works out great, and it can actually cost less
money for the user over time. If we're talking about
the kind of user who would regularly upgrade to the
latest version of a software package once it was released. If, however,
(46:35):
the user is the type who would normally just stick
with a basic version of software until like the heat
death of the Universe, it would not be as good
a deal. The A a S or as a service
extension goes to tons of other stuff as well. Like
there's platform as a service or p a a S.
(46:56):
That's where you have a company providing a typically a
modular computer GRAHAM for the purposes of developing, deploying, or
running applications. But there's lots of other stuff. There's artificial
intelligence as a service, there's big data as a service,
games as a service, machine learning as a service. The
list goes on and on. Essentially, it all comes down
(47:17):
to this switch from treating software or whatever as a
product to treating it as an ongoing service. You know,
something you can smack an ongoing subscription fee onto. We
see this reflected in how we consume media these days.
I'm guessing a lot of the music and movies and
television shows you watch come to you through some sort
(47:38):
of streaming service. Again, we've migrated away from purchasing something
like an album or a Blu ray or whatever, and
we've moved towards media through a subscription based streaming service.
Or maybe it's not a subscription based service. Maybe it
supports itself through ads, but it's the same basic idea.
(48:01):
It's a brave new world. I suppose I am cautiously
optimistic that our next episode will close out the last
of our acronyms and initialisms for now, So join me
on Wednesday to get through the rest of the alphabet.
In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future topics
I should cover on tech stuff, reach out to me
(48:23):
and let me know what they are. A lot of
you have been doing that. It's awesome. Keep doing it.
The Twitter handle where you can reach me is text
stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
(48:44):
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 I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer for I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech end. Hey, we're back
with our tech Glossary series. We've made it up to
(00:26):
acronyms and initialisms that start with the letter P. This
is part five. So if you're joining me now and saying, hey,
the alphabet doesn't start with the letter P, that means
you should probably go back, you know, several episodes to
listen to the beginning of this series. So we're taking
lots of popular groupings of letters that you typically see
(00:46):
in tech, and we're explaining what those actually means. So
when you come across them, you'll say, oh, I know
what that stands for, and I know what it's for,
so let's get back to it. First up is pc B.
This means printed circuit board. Alright, So a circuit is
essentially a path for transmitting electric current, and you know,
(01:11):
typically we make circuits so that we can have electric
current do work for us in some way. For example,
a circuit might include a path that leads to a
light bulb that has an incandescent filament inside it. The
current flows through the path, flows into the light bulb
goes through that filament, causing it to heat up and
(01:32):
incandesce or give off light, and then the current continues
through to the end of the circuit, which is pretty simple. Now,
in the early days of circuitry, you would use conductive
wire to connect all the elements of your circuits. But
wires take up space, they can get tangled, they can
get disconnected. Uh, you would have to solder things. If
(01:53):
we could only depend upon the types of circuits that
you can build with like bread boards and stuff where
you're just learning, all of our electronics would be much
much larger, and again you would have to sauder stuff.
That's a very slow and painstaking process, especially when you
first start and you're not too sure of yourself, and
if you make a mistake, it really slows you down
(02:13):
even more. Then, in nine a guy named Charles Ducas
filed a patent for a design that served as a
foundation for modern circuits. What he did was he took
a wooden board and he used a stencil, and he
laid the stencil against the wooden board, and then he
attached conductive materials onto the board itself. Through this stincil.
(02:36):
The conductive materials served the same purpose as wires, but
it laid flat against the boards, which saved a lot
of space and hassle. Move forward a little more than
a decade, and in nineteen thirty six you had an
Austrian inventor named Paul Eisler who made the first actual
printed circuit board. While Ducas had stenciled conductive material to
(02:58):
a board, Eisler had experience with industrial printers that were
used in the publishing world, and he theorized that he
could use that same sort of technology to print a
circuit directly to a non conductive base. That's really important,
you know, do costed the same thing he used a
wooden board. Wood is non conductive. The material that the
(03:20):
circuit is built on top of has to be non conductive,
or else you can't channel where the current is supposed
to go. It'll just flow through all the conductive material.
So with modern PCBs we call this base the substrate.
Printing a circuit board solved tons of problems. For one thing,
as long as you design your circuit properly on the
(03:41):
front end, and as long as the printing equipment was
working as intended. You could print and reproduce your circuit
without having to be fussed about making a mistake. You
weren't in danger of soldering a wire to the wrong
contact or anything like that, so that was a huge
benefit to this approach. Paul Eisler's story is a really
(04:02):
dramatic one. There are a lot of trials and tribulations
and tragedy and triumphlets of alliteration there, and I may
have to dedicate a full episode to him in the
future because it's a pretty fascinating story. These days, PCBs
tend to be made by taking a non conductive substrate
then laminating a thin layer of copper foil to the surface. Now,
(04:24):
copper is conductive, so you might wonder, well, what gives
if you completely coat the surface with a copper coding
and well there's a following step which involves using chemicals
to etch the copper away. So what you do is
you coat the bits of copper you want to keep,
you know, the stuff that's actually going to serve as
the connective channels for your circuit components. So all the
(04:47):
circuit tree parts, you cote that with a protective chemical
you leave the rest of the copper uncovered. Then when
you introduced the chemicals to the circuit board, the chemicals
are only able to eat the exposed copper away. They
leave behind all the stuff that you've protected, and voila,
you've got your printed circuit board. You can also make
(05:09):
circuit boards with much smaller channels this way, using the
etching method, and you'll find PCBs in all sorts of
modern electronics. Computer motherboards are a type of PCB. Smartphones, radios,
DVD players, game consoles, cars, systems, tons of stuff have
printed circuit boards in them. It's pretty nifty. Okay. Moving
(05:30):
on p d A. Now, in tech this does not
refer to public displays of affection. And I'm not going
to make some sort of you know, crew joke about
how tech nerds don't have experience with that type of
p d A because that joke is old and tired
and not accurate, thank you very much. It's in fact
(05:51):
so old and tired that it's even more old and
tired than I am. And that's saying something. But no,
a p d A in this context is a personal
digital assistant, which is more or less just a handheld computer.
These devices predated the smartphone. One way to describe a
traditional p d A is to say it was kind
of like a smartphone without the phone part. In the
(06:14):
old days, you would have your p d A and
you would use a cable or a docking station to
sinc the pd A to a computer, and software running
on your computer would interact with the doct p d
A and transfer over information like contacts, new email documents,
et cetera. This could go both ways. The p d
A could end up adding new context to your database
(06:36):
on your computer, and that way you would have access
to this information on the go while your computer remained
packed up or back at the office. They were really
just an electronic version of the old pen and paper
schedulers and appointment calendars that you know, organized people relied upon.
While you could make a decent argument that the nineteen
(06:57):
four British made handheld computer called the Ion Organizer counts
as a p d A, I think most folks would
really point to the early nineteen nineties when talking about
the earliest p d A s and we get the
term personal digital assistant from Apple and the infamous Apple
Newton in Two Apples. Then CEO John Scully, someone who
(07:21):
is frequently reviled in the history of Apple, revealed the
Newton at C E S and yeah, back in the day,
way back in the day, Apple would actually attend C
E S. How how times have changed. The Newton was
to have handwriting recognition technology, and it would allow people
to write notes down on a digital screen using a
special stylus, and the Newton would then, in theory, convert
(07:45):
the handwritten stuff you put on the screen into text
and you would have an electronic copy of your notes. Now,
some technical shortcomings gave Newton a bad name early on,
though Apple would continue to work on the technology and
improve it. However, our first impressions are really hard to shake,
and generally speaking, the Apple Newton became something of a joke,
(08:05):
literally in the case of a Simpsons episode. But many
other companies introduced PDAs over the years. One of the
big ones was Palm, and over time companies would build
in capabilities to allow PDAs to connect directly to the Internet,
removing the necessity to dock a p d A with
a computer to transfer information to the p d A.
(08:26):
For the most part, smartphones have replaced p d A s.
As you know smartphone apps replicate the various functions found
in those old devices. But it was a pretty darn
good run. It's just a short one, and I've heard
some folks, including myself, use p d A to refer
to stuff like Sirie, Google Assistant, and Alexa. But I
(08:46):
suspect this is not super accurate and that I am
guilty of perpetuating a misunderstanding, for which I apologize. I
think the generally accepted terms for those kind of things
are smart assistant or virtual assistant, and sometimes just personal assistant,
So I will try to remember not to use personal
(09:07):
digital assistant when referring to stuff like Siri. Next up
p d F. This stands for Portable Document Format. So
the company Adobe developed the PDF format to address a problem.
Let's say that you are working on electronic document and
a word processing program on a PC, and that this
(09:29):
is back in the early nineties, and you want to
send this document to someone else for them to review it.
But that person uses a Mac computer and the Mac
computer is not compatible with the file formats that your
PC based word processing program generates. So what do you do?
Adobe solution was creating a file type that isn't tied
(09:49):
to a specific operating system or a type of hardware,
or a type of word processing or you know, productivity software.
It was, however, proprietary to Adobe nearly two decades before
the company released it as an open standard in two
thousand eight. The original concept was that you would create
a document with whichever software you were reliant upon and
(10:11):
on whatever type of computer you happen to own. Then
you would convert that document to the PDF format, which
effectively captured the document in its final state. Then you
could send that BDF to whomever you needed to and
they would be able to view it on whatever type
of machine they used. However, you did need a special
(10:32):
PDF viewer to look at those documents, at least initially.
The file sizes could get quite big as well, uh
larger than the native file formats you were working with.
So let's say you were making a word document then
you converted it to PDF. You would see that the
PDF file might be much larger than the word file,
and they weren't meant to be edited, so making changes
(10:54):
to a PDF file wasn't really meant to be a thing.
A b DF is kind of more like an image
than a document file. It's more like a picture of
a document. It is possible to edit them these days,
either directly using Adobe products or using software like Microsoft
Word or the cloud based Google Drive suite. And when
(11:15):
creating PDFs, you can make some fields interactive, which allows
people to place digital signatures on files and that kind
of thing, or you know, check boxes in a checklist.
But one thing that I think is important to remember
is that PDF files can sometimes also be hosts to malware.
Because PDFs can hold embedded code, including hyperlinks or those
(11:36):
interactive fields, it is possible to embed malware within a
PDF itself, so it's always good to keep your antivirus
software up to date. It's also a good idea to
scan your files if you aren't confident that they came
from a safe source, or just not open them at
all if you aren't you know, sure of where they
came from. This is a good rule in general. Next,
(11:59):
we've U P HP and originally this initialism stood for
personal home page, but now it doesn't. It's kind of
like how MTV used to stand for Music Television but
now it's just MTV, or how AMC used to be
American Movie Classics, but now it's just a MC p
HP is a type of scripting language used in web development.
(12:22):
It's an open source language and it can be embedded
into HTML, which is hypertext markup language. We covered that
in a previous episode in this series. PHP code executes
on the server side of things, and it can be
used to make dynamic web content, meaning content that actually
changes either because of an interaction that happens on a
(12:44):
web page or it just is able to change over time.
This is a good time for us to kind of
reflect and remember the old old days of the web.
So back when the World Wide Web was very young,
it took a pretty good amount of work to make
a web page. You might use a document program. For instance,
I used just a very simple text editor program to
(13:06):
build out a page in HTML before then uploading the
code to a server. Then you would hop on over
onto a web browser and see what the results were
of your hard work and whether or not you laid
out your page correctly or if in fact you were
going to have to go back into that text editor
and make some changes to your HTML code. It was
(13:28):
a fairly slow process and because of that, and because
HTML initially didn't really support dynamic elements, it would mean
that most web pages you encountered would be static. That is,
each web page was sort of a stable document and
it didn't change. So if you visited someone's web page,
there wasn't real really much point in visiting it again.
(13:51):
I mean, it's just it's going to be the same page.
You could click on links and stuff and go to
other you know, web pages or documents or whatever, but
what you saw on the web page was going to
remain the same over time. PHP is one of the
scripting languages that allows developers to create web pages that
are not static, but they can update or change in
real time. Dynamic scripting allows for stuff like posting comments
(14:14):
on a page and having them show up. That's one
of the simplest versions I could think of. Dynamic elements
allow for stuff like e commerce. Without it, businesses web
page might be nothing more than the electronic equivalent of
an advertising flyer, you know, maybe giving a perspective customer
and email address to write to or a phone number
(14:34):
to call. As I record this. PHP version eight point
one point oh Alpha two is in early testing. It
is not yet ready for production, but it is a
scripting language that continues to receive updates, so that's kind
of cool. Okay, we've got a lot more letters of
the alphabet to get through. Let's take a quick break,
(15:04):
all right. Next up, we've got p n G, or
portable network Graphics. Some people pronounce it as ping, which
is somewhat confusing because ping is something else. A ping
in tech typically is when you're talking about a signal
that's sent from a client to a server to wait
for a response and find out how much latency there
(15:26):
is between the two connections, so you know how much
of a delay there is between the two. That's not
what this gonna ping is. P n G is a
graphics file format that supports lossless data compression, So that
means it uses a method to compress file sizes that
does not discard information about the file itself. When you
view the image, you get all the information from the original.
(15:49):
This makes it similar to the GIF file format or
or jeff if you insist on being wrong. Uh. And
this is in contrast with the JPEG format. Jpeg uses
a lossy form of compression. Now, the PM format can
compress down further than a GIFT can, and that means
that many of the images on the web these days
(16:10):
are actually PM files not GIF files. Greater compression means
you get smaller file sizes. That means faster loading times
when you're visiting a web page. It also means less
bandwidth usage, so there are a lot of benefits to it.
The group that developed PNG aimed to create a format
that would allow for better color recreation, and also to
(16:31):
make a format that wouldn't be covered under a patent.
That would mean that people and companies would actually be
able to use this new format without having to apply
for a license from a patent holder in order to
do so. The format also allows control of opacity and transparency,
which is quite handy. This is what allows people to
make images that lay right on top of a background
(16:53):
without having that irritating block of white around the image,
you know, kind of like a canvas or frame. And
with aacity control, it's possible to make parts of the
image transparent and parts of it opaque. That could come
in pretty handy depending upon what effect you're striving for.
Moving on, we've got raid. It's not a not an
(17:15):
insect aside in this case, here's an acronym that actually
has two similar full names and they both mean the
same thing. So another example of this in this series
was digital versatile disc and digital video disc. Both of
those mean DVD. They're both for the same thing. It's
just that digital versatile disc is the quote unquote official
(17:35):
name for it. Anyway. A RAID is either a redundant
array of independent discs or a redundant array of inexpensive discs.
And it's a very practical solution to some pretty common problems.
Problem no one technology breaks and I'm sure we've all
(17:55):
experienced this. Maybe your computer keeps crashing, maybe your car
are won't start, maybe the washing machine starts making this weird,
high pitched sound and then it just gives up. The
ghost stuff breaks down thanks a lot in tropy stupid
laws of the universe. But what if you happen to
be reliant on digital information, like that's the basis of
(18:19):
your business or some endeavor you're pursuing, and if access
to the digital information went away, you would be up
the proverbial poopy creek without a paddle. That would be
what we call in the tech business, a bad thing.
So you'd probably want to store the information in a
(18:39):
couple of different places so that if one of those
things fails, you would still have it somewhere else. In fact,
some of us do this in our day to day
lives without even having it ever touched tech. I know
I have written down the same thing a few times
in different places so that I can make sure I
had access to it. This is called redundancy, the practice
(19:02):
of having backups so that you're not at a loss
if your primary system should fail. And then there's the
word inexpensive. That's also important. Sure, you could create a
system in which you were using the top of the
line equipment with the fastest processors and all of that
kind of stuff. But if what you're really just trying
(19:22):
to do is store some information, then going with that
sort of bleeding edge technology would be a really big waste.
It would just be throwing way too much hardware at
something that didn't need that as a solution. What you
really need is something that's reliable, but it doesn't have
to be the best of the best. You just need
something that's going to work when you need it to.
(19:43):
And even then you can start tweaking these settings a
little bit, right Like, you can think of this like
sliders on a control board. Maybe you've got one slider
that's labeled cost and you've got a second slider that's
labeled reliability, and their linked to each other. And the
more rely will the tech, the more expensive it is.
And in fact, the cost might increase faster than the
(20:04):
reliability does. So maybe when you're at you know, level three,
cost is three and reliability is three. But if you
move reliability up to five, suddenly cost is six and
reliability is five. Move reliability up to seven, cost is ten.
You see what I'm saying, Like, costs can get higher
faster than you actually see an increased reliability. But maybe
(20:27):
you find a sweet spot somewhere that because the cost
is at a certain level, you can have several redundant
systems to support each service, and yeah they're not the
most reliable, but the reliable enough you might see some failures,
but you would save money on the far end of
(20:47):
it because the cheaper systems work well enough that you
didn't have to shell out the big, big bucks for
the more expensive ones. So it becomes this sort of
risk analysis kind of thing. You figure out, well, how
likely is any system to go down at any given time,
how many backups do I need to make sure that
that is not a problem, and how expensive will it be,
(21:08):
and generally speaking, you can go for some pretty cheap stuff.
Big data centers use RAID servers to handle data through virtualization.
Now that refers to using computer software to build out
a virtual machine that relies on actual physical hardware but
isn't necessarily tied to a single device. You can have
a computer running one or more virtual machines, or you
(21:32):
can have virtual machines that are kind of distributed across
multiple computers. Using virtualization and RAID architecture, companies can have
high performance, reliable systems and not freak out should part
of it go down. And I'm pretty sure just about
every cloud service out there relies on RAID implementations. There
are different ways to handle the redundancy aspect, but the
(21:54):
goal is always the same to provide a way to
ensure service is not going to get interrupted even in
the event of a catastrophic failure of one system. Like
let's say that a server just breaks down entirely, maybe
it's power supply goes bad. Others can then end up
taking on the load because they are redundant systems. Now,
(22:14):
there there are other things that can go wrong and
they can interrupt service, like if the communication lines out
to the general Internet are broken. Well, it doesn't matter
how many redundant systems you have, right if your communication
channel is cut, then you don't have any way of communicating.
So there are other things that can go wrong, but
at least on this particular end of the system, you
(22:36):
have some failsafe measures. There's a lot more that could
be said about RAID systems. I could go into a
lot more detail, but I'm gonna save that for a
full episode in the future at some point. Next up,
we got RAM and DRAM and stram and RAM, or
rather r A M d R A M S d
R A M v R A M, etcetera. So welcome
(22:57):
to the many flavors of random access memory. That's what
RAMS stands for. I would call it random access memories,
but that's a daft punk album, which is awesome of course,
But that's not what I need to cover today. First,
let's talk about computer memory in general. So computers, when
you boil them down, uh, but you know, don't boil
(23:18):
them down. That will invalidate your warranty anyway. Computers are
machines that take data, they perform some type of operation
on that data, and they produce output based on the
outcome of that process. Now, the data needs to come
from somewhere. It could come directly from input, like you know,
(23:39):
a switch being thrown, or a key being pressed or
a button being pushed, or a computer might pull data
from a long term storage solution such as a hard disk.
But to work quickly and efficiently, computers need a way
to store at least some information temporarily in order to
refer back to that. And sometimes techno nerds like me
(23:59):
will use analogy of long term versus short term memory
with humans. Data stored on a hard drive is more
like long term memory, it's there for the long haul,
but RAM is more like short term memory. Like if
someone tells you, hey, just so you know, you need
to push on that door to open it. You've got
the information stored in short term memory, and you can
(24:21):
use that info when you go up to the door,
but you don't necessarily need it forever, right like, if
you're only going through that door once, you really just
need that information long enough to not make you look
like a weirdo as you are pulling very hard on
a door that's meant to be pushed. Now, beyond this
little surface level, this analogy starts to break down. So
(24:41):
we're gonna shift a bit. We're not gonna you know,
it's not exactly the same. It's not apples to apples.
Computer memory represents a way for a computer to reference
information quickly without seeking it in long term storage and
random access memory is dynamic, meaning it can be read
from or chain to buy the computer without a problem.
(25:02):
It can also be accessed in any order, which gives
the computer a quick ability to go straight to the
bit of data in the memory that's necessary, that's needed
for whatever is going on, without having to read through
all the data in random axis memory. To use another analogy,
let's say that you're told to find the specific quote
there was only one catch, and that was catch twenty
(25:24):
two from the novel catch twenty two. But you're not
giving any information about where in the novel that quote appears.
You would probably start from the very beginning of the
book and start scanning the novel line by line looking
for that quote, which is time consuming. But let's say
instead you have a reference that gives you the chapter
(25:45):
and page number, and it tells you to look in
chapter five to find this quote. Now you can skip
right over chapters one through four, you can go to
where the info you need happens to be. That's kind
of like how RAM works. The computer doesn't have to
scan through the entirety of what's in this dynamic memory
to find what it needs. RAM can also be volatile,
meaning that if you were to turn off your computer,
(26:07):
the information stored within the machines RAM gets wiped out.
RAM is really only important for helping to do the
things that you're actually doing on the computer right then
and there, so it doesn't need to get etched in
stone or anything. You've got long term storage for that
kind of thing. That's RAM in a nutshell. But let's
talk about these other flavors really quickly, and this is
(26:29):
just a very high level I'm not going to dive
into each of these. That would take way too long.
So d RAM stands for dynamic random access memory and
s d RAM is a subtype of that. It's called
synchronous dynamic random access memory. There's also d d R
s d RAM, which at first I thought was dance
(26:50):
Dance Revolution s d RAM, but no. In fact, d
d R stands for it double data rate. Now, generally speaking,
these behave very much in the same way as RAM,
but with improved efficiency and speed for certain applications and implementation.
So it's you could say, it's RAM but better. D
(27:10):
RAM requires more power and generates more heat than your
run of the mill RAM does, however, so there are
tradeoffs here. Then we've got v RAM. This is video RAM,
which is a variant of dynamic RAM, and it used
to be a popular way to help buffer frames and
graphics cards so that you would have a smooth experience
running graphic intensive applications like you know, like video games.
(27:34):
It's not really used anymore, however. It's essentially been replaced
by s d RAM, which eventually got good enough so
that we didn't need a specialized video RAM anymore. Next,
we have our f C. The stands for request for comments.
It's also a pretty misleading term these days, but back
in the old days, and RFC really was more of
(27:57):
a request for comments than it is today, and it
was all in an effort to initiate a dialogue about
how to set up the systems that one day would
be the the stuff that powers the Internet. Alright, so,
way back in the nineteen sixties, you had a group
of researchers and engineers and scientists who are working for
the Department of Defense in an effort to build out
(28:19):
networking technology UH and ultimately to create what was called
ARPA Net. In the ARPA Net project, it wasn't practical
to have everyone present at every working group meeting in
order to hash out the various protocols and approaches and
even philosophies that the group would initiate in order to
make computer and networking reality. However, there was also kind
(28:41):
of a general desire not to create an environment in
which maybe one small working group, for example, makes some
sort of declarative proclamation of this is how it must
be so the RFC approach, and which researchers would circulate
a proposed set of specifications or protocols or whatever, would
(29:03):
allow others to chime in and make suggestions or ask
for clarification. The goal was to make better systems through
this kind of collaborative approach, and not to have any
one working group dominate the process. Now, over time, these
documents became less about bringing an input and more about
just circulating technical information about the Internet, including the actual
(29:23):
infrastructure of computer networks, the protocols used by machines to
communicate with one another, and even more general concepts related
to networking. It's more about providing a series of technical
documents that explain the underpinnings of networks in general and
the Internet in particular, rather than encouraging some form of
group discussion. Once published, and RFC never changes, it is
(29:48):
not edited, it is not updated. This means that sometimes
there are errors in an RFC, then that means they're
there forever. The I E. T F one of the
organizations that oversee these r f c s. It does
have a way for people to report errors and it
does keep track of all errata. Next up is r
F I D. This stands for radio frequency identification. It's
(30:13):
actually a subset of automatic identification and data capture or
a I D C technologies. Now, generally speaking, these technologies
involved systems that allow for automatic detection of something specific,
and it includes identifying those specific things and then collecting
data about those specific things and maybe even incorporating that
(30:35):
data into databases without the need for a human operator.
It can all be on the automated side of things.
And I'm sure you've interacted with r F I D
tags before, and r F I D tag has the
information coded directly into it. So the r f I
D tag itself is an integrated circuit and it can
be a really thin and flexible one. Even it can
(30:56):
be in tags and stuff that are flexible. Uh this
sort it also includes an antenna. Now, most r f
I D chips are passive r f I D chips,
which means they don't have any power on their own.
They don't broadcast or anything like that. They are just there. However,
when they are brought within the broadcast reach of a
(31:18):
of an r f I D reader, which is essentially
broadcasting radio waves of a certain frequency, things change. The
r f I D tags antenna will pick up on
those radio waves which passed through the antenna, and then
it'll turn into essentially electricity. The whole process for that
is one I've covered several times in tech stuff. But
(31:39):
the energy goes into the passive chip that modulates the
signal and then broadcasts the modulated signal back out which
the reader can pick up on. That gives the reader
whatever information was hard coded into that r f I
D and that information can be lots of different stuff.
In fact, there are a lot of security systems that
use this sort of approach. You get badges that are
(32:02):
containing thin r f I D chips inside them and
the r f I D m the badge has a
identification in it that should match up to a database
of authorized personnel. Okay, so you walk up to a
door and it has an r f I D reader
next to it. That's your little badge reader. You hold
the badge up. The r f I D reader is
(32:24):
constantly sending out this low power radio signal. The r
f I D chip inside your badge detects the signal,
it goes through the antenna. It creates this modulated frequency
that gets sent back the reader picks up on. That
compares your badge to a database of authorized users. If
(32:45):
you show up on that boom, you get in. If
you don't show up on that, the door stays locked.
There are also active r f I D chips. These
are chips that actually require a battery. They have to
have a power source because these chips do constantly broadcast
out information that can be picked up by readers. They
also tend to be bulk here because they require a
(33:06):
power source, they're more expensive, and they're not really necessary
for a lot of the applications that we typically use.
R F I D four. Okay, it's time for another break.
But when we come back, we will continue down the
RS like a pirate. Next up is r G B
(33:30):
and this stands for red, green, and blue. It's an
additive color model. That means it's a color model in
which you can create different colors by adding different amounts
or intensities of the three primary colors of the model together.
In this case red, green, and blue. So to get white,
you would add all three together. And this works when
(33:50):
you're talking about light, right, when you're talking about wavelengths
of light, because essentially you're adding wavelengths together. If you
remember from the color spectrum, know that it's not just
that it goes from red to orange, to yellow, to green,
to blue, to indigo to violet, but that the wavelength
of light for each of those bands is different with
(34:11):
with it getting smaller as you get further into the spectrum.
So red wavelengths have the longest wavelengths and then violet
has the shortest. And UM. Yeah, by adding different lights together,
you're essentially adding the wavelengths together, and you can adjust
the color that way. This UM this really only works
(34:32):
when you're talking about light. If you're using physical dyes
like actual paint or something. If you were to keep
mixing all the colors together, then you would end up
with black or really just a really dark, unpleasant color.
So it doesn't work with that approach. It only works
really with light display technologies rely on the r GB
(34:52):
color model. Older displays had cables and and and ports
for composite signals. That was not as nice like that's
where these different light sources would be merged together before
being sent to a display. But by keeping these signals
separate in their red, green, and blue colors, our GB
(35:14):
displays can combine them into a better quality image. That
was a short one. Let's move on. How about r
I s C or RISK. This actually stands for reduced
instruction set computer. So your typical computer is a general
purpose device, which means it needs to be able to
do a little bit of everything. But in order for
(35:36):
a machine to be capable of doing a bit of everything,
you have to make certain sacrifices when it comes to
stuff like speed and efficiency. If you were to optimize
a machine for a subset of routines, you might make
it perform at you know, a lower rate for anything
outside of those routines, but anything that fell into its
(35:57):
wheelhouse it could do really, really well. So when you're
making a general purpose machine, you might just bite the
bullet and create a system that can handle pretty much
everything but isn't really optimized for anything. In particular. Risk, however,
relies on highly optimized instruction sets. So let's say you
want to build out a system that would really focus
(36:18):
on something specific like video processing. This task doesn't require
your system to also be good at other stuff. It
just needs to be wicked good at processing video, So
you architect a system that optimizes everything towards video production. Now,
if you want to use the system to process videos,
(36:39):
it's really fast, much faster than a general purpose computer
would be. In fact, you can have an optimized video
processing station that's faster than a general purpose computer, even
if that general purpose computer technically has better hardware in it,
like a better processor, because optimization can go a really
long way. But another way to look at it is
(37:01):
just in how processors complete instructions. So the opposite of
an R I s C machine is a C I
s C, or complex instruction set computer. A complex instruction
might involve lots of individual steps per instruction, and a
a c I s C or CISK CPU would understand that.
(37:24):
You would understand, oh, this one instruction involves multiple steps,
and would execute those steps to complete the task. For
an r I s C system, first you would have
to break down those steps into simpler instructions, and depending
on the task, the r I s C machine might
complete the overall effort faster than the C I s
(37:46):
C machine. But if the task means that the RISK
system is having to break down lots of complex instructions
into simpler ones, the CISC machine wins out. So it's
all dependent upon what applications you're trying to run. You
can think of RISK machines as needing instructions to be
broken down to their most basic level before it can
(38:06):
execute them, whereas a CISCU machine can take a more
general set of instructions and get to work. So there's
not really one that's better than the other. It's all
dependent upon how you're using them and how they've been optimized.
Next up, we've got ROM. This stands for read only memory. Now,
(38:27):
remember when we talked about RAM and how that kind
of memory is volatile. I mean, once you shut down
a machine, the information in RAM goes away. Well. ROM
is non volatile. It is hard coded, so ROM includes
hard coded instructions that persist whether the computer is on
or not. Also, as the describer read only suggests, this
(38:50):
type of memory cannot be changed under normal circumstances. You
can read from this, but you cannot write to it.
And if you're an old Fogy like me, you might
remember the days of home video game consoles that took cartridges.
The cartridges actually had printed circuit boards inside them, and
(39:11):
these were ROMs. The game everything from the graphics to
the instructions on how the console should respond to player input,
to the music, you know, everything that made the game
the game was printed on the circuit boards. They were
unchangeable unless you were to like break open the cartridge
and get the old soldering iron out and make some
(39:32):
changes by hand, which is not recommended by the way.
So the stuff that goes into ROM typically includes the
instructions the computer needs to start up. It's kind of
like the basic information the computer uses in the booting process,
and that's why you wouldn't really want to be able
to change it. Next up, we have r t F
that stands for Rich Text Format which is a proprietary
(39:54):
document format from Microsoft. The company introduced this format in
then with the intent for it to be kind of
a step up from plain old text files. So unlike
you know, the the older text files, the RTF format
can actually hold some extra information that text files can't,
(40:16):
including stuff like font style you don't get that with
regular text files, or how to incorporate images is another
feature that you don't find in text files. Now, it's
nowhere near as feature full as like you know, a
word document from Microsoft would be. However, lots of different
apps and programs can open r t F files, but
(40:37):
they can't open word files. So if you need to
type up a document but you couldn't be certain that
the people you were going to share this document with
had word you might go with r TF. Microsoft ended
development of r TF back in two thousand eight. Now
that doesn't mean the format disappeared. Many word processing apps
still support it because of that universality. You might open
(40:59):
a file using one word processing program, make some changes
to it, save it back as r TF, then open
that same file but using a totally different computer with
a different operating system and a different word processing program.
In order to continue so it still has its uses,
though with the growth of cloud based solutions, it's not
quite as relevant as it used to be. Next, we
(41:22):
have S A A S, big S, little, A little,
A big S, and this ties right into what we
were just talking about. S A A S stands for
software as a service, and this marks a different approach
to the software business from the old days. So let's
talk about those old days and about how we moved
from product to service. All right, So it's the early
(41:46):
nineteen eighties and you just bought your first personal computer
and you're so excited, and you're gonna go shopping for
some software that you want on your new PC. And
you want to use this PC to do some productivity work.
So you invest in a word processing program and a
spreadsheet program and maybe a few other applications. You purchase
each of these from some software company, maybe all of
(42:09):
them come from the same company, and each program has
a set price, so you pay the price and boom,
the program is yours to install on your computer, and
the transaction is over. That's it. You've got it. Now.
Over time, maybe the software company releases new versions of
those programs with you know, more features and stuff and
(42:30):
if you want to be able to use those features,
you would need to go out and buy the new
version of this program and then install that on your computer. However,
each purchase would be its own discrete event. You buy it,
you install it, it's yours. Now let's take a little
step forward. Let's say that you start to run a
(42:51):
small office and you want each of your employees to
have a computer that's running a certain suite of software.
You might make an arrangement with big company like Microsoft
to get a license for multiple copies of software. Because
you're not supposed to just buy one copy of a
program and then install it on five or ten computers
or whatever. Companies actually developed ways to prevent users from
(43:15):
doing that. There are penalties if you try and work
around it. So now you get a license to use
a certain number of installations of software. It's a little
bit different from before. But let's take another step forward. Now,
Let's say you're running an office and you find that
there's a company that's offering a suite of productivity solutions
that are running over the cloud. So the actual applications
(43:38):
like the word processor and the spreadsheet program, they're all
running on servers on the Internet. They're not running on
your own computers. You use the Internet to connect to
those services. So instead of installing software to your machines,
you use some form of client software to access them,
which is probably just a web browser. Rather than purchasing
the software outright, you're paying a subscription fee in order
(44:01):
to access the software. There are pros and cons to this.
As a user, the big con, as I guess you
can spot right off the bat, is that you're not
just making a single purchase and then that's the end
of the transaction. Instead, you have this recurring subscription fee,
so you continue to pay for the product as you
(44:22):
use it, or as I should say, you continue to
pay for the service as you use it. But on
the pro side of things, with software as a service,
you can expect to benefit from improvements to the software
over time. You know, in the old days, like I said,
you would have to purchase a new version of the
software when the company would release it if you wanted
those features. Instead, with software as a service, you get
(44:45):
those benefits as the company that provides the service improves
the cloud based software. So as long as you're a subscriber,
you get access to those new features that means no
more having to upgrade all of your offices copies of
say Microsoft off this every few years. Instead, you just
subscribe to this software as a service and you get
the new features as they are implemented. The other big
(45:09):
benefit to software as a service is that you might
be able to access the software with any compatible machine
as long as you have your log in credentials. So,
in other words, you don't have to worry if this
new computer has the software loaded onto it. We're not
as long as it has web browser or you know,
whatever the client is to access the service. It makes
the software way more flexible and portable because you, as
(45:32):
a user, can access it with any compatible network connected device.
So let's say that I forgot my work computer at
the office I accidentally left it there. Well, fortunately, because
we're using a lot of cloud based productivity software, I
could use my home computer and log into my account
(45:53):
via the cloud and get access to all of my notes,
all of my scripts, everything like that. Uh, because I'm
able to access it through this cloud based service as
opposed to it having a native application running on just
my office computer. For companies like Microsoft, this approach is
(46:14):
crazy profitable, like profit margin, so from a revenue sense,
it works out great, and it can actually cost less
money for the user over time. If we're talking about
the kind of user who would regularly upgrade to the
latest version of a software package once it was released. If, however,
(46:35):
the user is the type who would normally just stick
with a basic version of software until like the heat
death of the Universe, it would not be as good
a deal. The A a S or as a service
extension goes to tons of other stuff as well. Like
there's platform as a service or p a a S.
(46:56):
That's where you have a company providing a typically a
modular computer GRAHAM for the purposes of developing, deploying, or
running applications. But there's lots of other stuff. There's artificial
intelligence as a service, there's big data as a service,
games as a service, machine learning as a service. The
list goes on and on. Essentially, it all comes down
(47:17):
to this switch from treating software or whatever as a
product to treating it as an ongoing service. You know,
something you can smack an ongoing subscription fee onto. We
see this reflected in how we consume media these days.
I'm guessing a lot of the music and movies and
television shows you watch come to you through some sort
(47:38):
of streaming service. Again, we've migrated away from purchasing something
like an album or a Blu ray or whatever, and
we've moved towards media through a subscription based streaming service.
Or maybe it's not a subscription based service. Maybe it
supports itself through ads, but it's the same basic idea.
(48:01):
It's a brave new world. I suppose I am cautiously
optimistic that our next episode will close out the last
of our acronyms and initialisms for now, So join me
on Wednesday to get through the rest of the alphabet.
In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future topics
I should cover on tech stuff, reach out to me
(48:23):
and let me know what they are. A lot of
you have been doing that. It's awesome. Keep doing it.
The Twitter handle where you can reach me is text
stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
(48:44):
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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