Technology isn’t the easiest thing to understand. And, if you’re anything like my friends outside this company, any time you hear a tech term you simply nod your head and smile. Many times, these terms are used so often and so nonchalantly that you feel as if you should know what they mean, which also means you’re not about to stop someone and say, “Excuse me, but what exactly is a virus?”
You may laugh at this notion, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Can you honestly tell me what a virus is? Probably not. Many people hear terms like virus, data backup, and phishing, but really, they have no clue what they mean. And this isn’t anything to be embarrassed about. If no one has ever explained the meaning of these terms to you, and if you don’t work in the tech industry, then it’s to be expected.
So TAG would like to help clear things up. Over the span of a few posts, we’ll teach you what all these everyday tech terms really mean. Let’s start with three right now.
The Internet of Things
I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase once or twice or a few thousand times. By now, you’ve probably halfway pieced together what it means, so let’s finish the puzzle together. The Internet of Things, or the IoT, is the ability of things to connect to people, people to things, and things to other things. This is where all those hundreds of “smart” items come into play. Take a Fitbit for instance. It connects to your body, and you connect to it. Your Fitbit connects to another thing—your smartphone. Together, they build information from the data that your body transfers into the wearable. You, the Fitbit, and your phone create connections that communicate with and through the internet.
In the future, most of what we interact with will be a part of the IoT.
Cookies
Mashable claims the term “cookies” was chosen for no other reason than that the creator, a former Netscape programmer by the name of Lou Montulli, liked the word. But what are they really?
A cookie is a file that contains information about you. This file is stored on your hard drive, and when you revisit a website, the cookie is what allows this site to “remember” you. Depending on your settings, cookies may remember your browsing history, login credentials, or form information. From here, you would receive targeted ads, or you could autofill your account information.
The Cloud
Many people first came into contact with the infamous “cloud” because of Apple and their iCloud or Google and their Drive. Everybody’s storing their photos and contacts in this “really big file that never fills up” and this isn’t far from the truth.
The Cloud, or Cloud Computing, is simply another way to store digital items with the help of a data center and a whole lot of servers. Your file, video, or image is transferred from your device and onto a remote server. It may even be copied and placed onto several servers. When you access these files at a later date, you’re actually tapping into these servers (that may or may not be hundreds of miles away).
Stay tuned for more tech terms!
