 Hi and welcome to this edition of Sam's Tech Talk. This is a show where we talk about everything about computers and technical devices to let you know more about everything you want to know about those devices and the things that are associated with them. Today we're going to talk about terms. We're going to talk about all those words and things that you hear that you wonder what the heck are they talking about. And I hope I cover enough of the basic ones so you can at least talk with the average person and know what you're talking about. So the first thing I want to talk to you about is PC and what that means. Basically it stands for personal computer and that's anything from your classic desktop to your tablet to your laptop any of those things anything that is a personal computer that's what you call a PC. So no matter what device it is if it's a computer it's considered to be a PC. Now the second thing we talk about is the operating system. You know you come up to somebody and they say oh what operating system do you use. And basically there are four or five that most people use. First one is Windows which everybody is familiar with that one. Then the next one is the Apple operating system and that's anything that is made by Apple whether it's a Mac or whether it's an i product. Then the next thing that we have is the Android operating system and that's in some of your small tablets and it's also in most of your smartphones other than the iPhone. And then we have the Chrome operating system and that's the operating system that Google makes and you can access that one either via the internet on their website or you can access it via a Chromebook. So those are basically the ones that most people are familiar with. There are a few others but those are for real computer geeks so we won't go into those. Now the next thing we want to talk about is hardware. Hardware is anything physical the actual computer itself the DVD drive that goes with it your mouse any of those things anything that goes with your computer and actually the parts that are inside of your computer are the hardware. Then we're going to talk about software and software is how you do what you're going to do. It is the program or the app that you put in there to make your computer work because without programs hardware doesn't work so you have to have hardware and then software and the two of those work together to make your computer do what it's supposed to do. Then when we go from there when we talk about programs or apps now as I said before those are how you accomplish the things that you're going to do you know an example of that would be like Word to type a document or Google Docs to type a document wow then there are other things out there like say you like to edit photos those would be different programs or apps out there to do that or if you even go on to social media and those kinds of things Facebook is an app or a program Twitter is an app or a program all of those things are what we're talking about there. Then the next thing we talk about is icons or shortcuts icons are on your computer screen they are the physical little tile that you see on your screen that's basically like a shortcut to get what you do on older computers when you see a shortcut it actually has a little arrow that kind of swings around to the side so those are the things that you look at there then everybody knows what a mouse is it's that electronic device that attaches to your computer there and then we have the cursor the cursor is that little flashing dot that you need to locate on your screen to do what you want to do and then we have the pointer and typically when you move your mouse around there is a arrow that appears and that's how you find where you want to go you put that arrow where you want to do and then click on it and that gives you your cursor so those are the things there then we have hard drive and a lot of people confuse hard drive and memory to be the same thing because when they start having people start saying oh my computer doesn't have enough memory anymore what they're actually saying is my computer doesn't have enough hard drive space so what you do is your hard drive is where the information is stored your memory is how your fast your computer accesses that that information so remember your hard drive is actually where your data is stored and that is the size that matters the most part when it comes to putting things on your computer and then the memory is how fast your computer can find things and now we're going to talk about the measurement of the things that are inside your computer that being the bits the nibbles the bytes and the kilobytes and what that means for this first part is a bit or a bit makes up a nibble which makes up a bite and a bite has four nibbles and a bite is the equivalent of one character and what I mean by one character is one letter one number one comma one space anything that is a kid considered a character is what that is then you go up to what they say a megabyte which is what the common storage for everything is these days for the most things there and if you put that into perspective that would be about four two hundred page books and then we go from there to a gigabyte and a gigabyte is four thousand four hundred and seventy three two hundred page books and now the big thing that most of us know about is terabytes and to put that in perspective one terabyte handles a little over four and a half million two hundred page books or if you had one terabyte of storage you could put about 233 DVDs that have about four hours worth of information on them or you could put 40 Blu-ray discs so that's what we have there then it gets crazy we start getting into some other crazy crazy measurements we have what's called a petabyte and that's just over one quadrillion that is 15 zeros of bytes there and we talk about that you would have four a little over four and a half trillion two hundred page books two hundred and four about two hundred and forty thousand DVDs and about forty two thousand Blu-ray discs then after that we have what's called an exabyte and that's just over a quintillion and that's a one with 18 zeros and those are how many bytes are in there and that's almost five trillion two hundred page books or two and a half two hundred and forty five billion DVDs and I don't know about you guys but I don't plan on living long enough to watch that many DVDs in my life then after that we have what's called a zettabyte and a zettabyte is just over one sextillion and that's a one with 21 zeros it's really really huge and to put that one into perspective perspective you would have about see so we're a trillion DVDs and then after that we go to Yattabytes and a Yattabyte would be five quintillion books 257 trillion DVDs or 45 trillion Blu-ray discs and that's the biggest one that got measured now so if they have to go beyond that some of the cool names that they've proposed for the next ones are a hella byte or a Bronto byte and I think they use the Bronto term because like the huge huge dinosaur so that's what you go with there then after that we go to what we're going to talk about is what a USB drive is or USB storage and if most of you're familiar with that they sometimes call it a thumb drive and the reason they call it that is that there are those little bitty devices that are about the size of your thumb that you plug into the side of your computer to store device on as opposed to using disks like we used to use years ago and those can be bought up into the size of terabytes now so you can get them anything from megabytes to terabytes now now the big thing I want to talk about now is the cloud or cloud storage and most people think that the cloud is your data just floating around out in space and that's really not the case what it is is you think about the cloud being internet so it would be better term to use would be internet storage because what you're doing is using your computer to send your data or your pictures or everything else to another physical computer where your data is stored and it is very safe they take all kinds of security measures and the reason that it's called cloud is is because it's not here and I guess they thought the cloud analogy would be a good one to use so basically what cloud storage is is using the internet to transfer your information to a secure place that makes sure your data stays intact so in case your device breaks you can still get it all of your information and I think the cloud was coined by someone from Google years ago and that's what they brought that there to make that unbeat. Then the next thing we want to talk about is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Bluetooth Wi-Fi rather is an abbreviation for the term wireless fidelity and that means that you can access or connect your computer network or to the internet via radio waves and that's how that works and you don't have to have wires when you have Wi-Fi and the other thing is Bluetooth and Bluetooth is for connecting your devices together like connecting your phone and speakers that don't have a wire or that kind of thing or even printers now connect via Bluetooth to a certain degree that's how that works so what you mean is Wi-Fi lets you to connect to other computers and Bluetooth lets devices connect to each other and that's the difference in those two then the next thing we want to talk about is internet access and a lot of people go oh I don't have the internet actually everybody has the internet the internet is what is not your thing that you have to worry about what you have to be concerned about is your access and that is how you connect to the internet that's basically what internet access is internet access is how you connect to the internet that's where you go to one of your local providers and you pay them a fee to do that and you typically have a monthly fee for that and it can sometimes be shared like with different companies we give it for free like say most of the local coffee houses some of the restaurants and that kind of thing share internet access with you then the next thing we talk about is what internet connections are you know people say okay what kind of internet connection do you have most people have either long ago all we had was what they call the dial up connection where you physically had to connect your computer to a phone line and get the information from the internet through the phone line but now most people have what they call high speed internet and it goes through the same cables as like your cable TV goes through the same access there and even with the phone company they provide internet access on their networks as well and that would be what they call high speed internet so that's because the information travels faster to get to you then the next thing we talk about is actually what you do on your computer when you're connected to the internet it's called downloading which means receiving information from the internet you download an app you download a movie you know those kinds of things and then the other thing we talk about is upload that means you created something on your computer and now you want to send it to say your email provider or you want to send it to your cloud storage that's called uploading so what I'm saying here is that download means you receive the information from the internet and then upload means you send the information to the internet then everybody's favorite spam and junk mail basically what that means is is that it's any email that you didn't ask to be sent to you say you order something from an online vendor and then you start getting bombarded with all these emails from them those are considered to be junk mail or you visit some place and then they start sending you all your data to get you to stay there again do all those kinds of things those are considered to be junk mail and spam is the same thing spam and junk mail basically work the same way both of those things are that now what we're going to talk about is a virus or malware and the first thing is viruses most of the time a lot of people say oh do I have a virus on my computer and a virus basically is software can programs that are capable of basically slowing down your computer making it very sluggish and how it works and sometimes even not working at all it just completely shuts it down so that's the reason that it's important for you to have an operating system that has virus where included with it or to purchase software you know antivirus software and then the other thing they have is what they call malware and malware is software that is secretly installed on your computer when you access something and it is damaging your actual computer it is meant to destroy your device so that's the big thing you want to try to not get any of these things on your computer and the key thing about doing how to avoid that is don't open emails from people that you don't recognize don't open the attachments if you're not expecting attachments from a person those are the biggest ways you can prevent these things from happening to you just remember that don't open emails from people you don't know and don't open attachments when you're not expecting an attachment on your email then another thing to talk about is web browser a web browser is basically how you access the internet and it's the program that you use to access the internet there are about five that most people use most people use Google Chrome which is you know the chrome thing there then you have Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer is being replaced by Microsoft Edge they are both just the Windows you know Microsoft Windows version of a web browser so Internet Explorer is the older one and Edge is the newer one then another one that people like is called Foxfire and that's very common and then one that's not more computer geeks know it than anybody else is one that's called Opera they all take you to the same place they just might put it in a little bit different order when they look it up then the next thing we talk about is social media and social media is how people get together to share information either by messaging you know it's a it's the internet's equivalent of a social club and you have those out there most common one that most people recognize is Facebook then the one that's for the professional world is called LinkedIn and basically what LinkedIn is is Facebook for the business world people share on LinkedIn to make make their business contacts a little bit better and then another form of social media would be Twitter and that's one where you basically share things in just a few short words I think you have 45 words maximum on that then the next thing we talk about is hashtag or what people of my generation know as the pound sign and what the hashtag does is is it makes anything that you put after that hashtag a searchable information type thing so you might say hashtag Sheboygan and then if somebody clicks on that on the internet it's going to take them to anything that anybody else found worthy of being noted noted before that say hashtag Milwaukee Brewers or hashtag never knew that and the key thing about when you put something with the hashtag is is if there's more than one word don't put spaces between your words so if you wanted to say Milwaukee Brewers it would just be all one word no space between Milwaukee and Brewers and you always have to make sure that you spell things correctly if you want it to go the way you want it it's kind of interesting if you ever see a hashtag on a website touch it see what happens it's kind of interesting then finally I want to thank everybody for joining me and I'm sure that there are other phrases and other words and other terms that you want to know the different definition of and if that's the case just send me an email or contact us here at the station and we'll be happy to look it up for you find out the information and then maybe even include it on another show if another enough people want to know about it it's always great to learn new things about technology so I encourage everyone to just try to keep using it and try to keep learning because it's going to be a great adventure for everyone and I hope you'll join me next time for Sam's Tech Talk