Category: Buying Guide

The Best Places to Buy Discounted Gift Cards

12/25/2021 Leave a comment

The Best Places to Buy Discounted Gift Cards Gift cards are one of the easiest gifts to pick up at the last second and are also extremely safe bets to make for everyone on your gift list. But just because a gift card has a certain value doesn’t mean that’s how much you have to pay. There are plenty of […]

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This Month in Tech History

This Month in Tech History: September
This Month in Tech History: The last month of Summer brings in some monumental starts in the history of technology, from the beginning of the world’s most popular search engine to the start of a video game franchise that still dominates the industry. Read about all the details below.

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Terms

Bandwidth/Broadband

Bandwidth is an indication of how quickly data travels along a connection. The greater the bandwidth, the faster data will be sent and received. Broadband is a rather vague term that refers to bandwidth somewhere above that of an old dial-up modem, although there is no precise definition of the term. Broadband connections are generally “always on”, unlike modem connections. There are various technologies which provide “broadband” speeds – such as ADSL, cable, satellite etc.

ADWARE

Any advertising software which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used.

Military-Grade Encryption

Many companies tout “military-grade encryption” to protect your data. If it’s good enough for the military, it must be the best—right? Well, kind of. “Military-grade encryption” is more of a marketing term that doesn’t have a precise meaning.

Memory, Disk Space

Another very common source of confusion. In computing, “memory” generally refers to the temporary storage used by a computer whilst it is switched on. A computer loads programs and data into its memory in order to carry out tasks. This is more accurately called RAM or “random-access memory”. Disk space (or “hard disk space”), on the other hand, is a more permanent store that holds files even when the computer is switched off. It’s from here that the computer loads things into its memory. Strictly speaking you don’t store things in the computer’s memory as that vanishes when you turn the machine off.

Web Browser

A program you use to look at and navigate between, pages on the World Wide Web. Examples include Internet Explorer and Firefox although there are many others. Again, people sometimes refer to web browsers as “the Internet”, whereas they really only provide the means to view pages on the web.

Bits / Bytes

At a basic level, all computer data is just a series of 0s and 1s. Each of these is referred to as a “binary digit”, for which “bit” is just an abbreviation. A byte is (generally) a collection of eight bits, so called because of the pun with bit and bite. Similarly a collection of four bits – half a byte – is sometimes called a “nybble”.