Keeping up with the technological whiz kids Print E-mail
Written by Chris Ward, 2006   
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iPods

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Apple U2iPod
Apple Computers’ iPods are the Walkpersons of the 21st century. Instead of playing tapes or CDs, they play MP3 music files. MP3, if you wish to impress your children, means MPEG-1 (or -2) audio layer 3. MPEG is the Motion Picture Experts Group who decided just how things like sound and video could be put on to the Internet. The key thing about MP3 files is that they’re smaller than the audio files on a CD: a music CD contains around 700MB (MegaBytes) of information, but an MP3 file of the same album could be 100MB or smaller. This means that you can store more music files on your computer, or transfer them more quickly across the Internet.

MP3 does this by chucking away what it considers the ‘redundant’ parts of the music – the high notes and low notes the human ear can’t hear anyway and other irrelevant information. Audiophiles claim that this reduces the quality of the music. iPods connect to your PC by a cable and use a program called iTunes to manage your computerised music collection. iTunes can copy the music from a CD on to your computer and convert it automatically into the MP3 format, and then transfer it on to your iPod. You can copy your entire CD collection via your computer to your iPod and have the equivalent of hundreds and hundreds of albums in a package the size of a pack of cards. 

Blogs and Myspace

The ugly word “blog” comes from a conjunction of “web” and “log”. The more erudite bloggers prefer to keep online journals or diaries – for example www.mostxlnt.co.uk/diary, which I’ve been writing in various forms since 1998 (well before the word “blog” was coined). Back then I wrote extended pieces about the technology I was covering for The Times. This evolved as I moved to France, gave up journalism and became a cook.

You’ll find numerous blogging sites on the Internet – www.blogger.com, for example, and Myspace (www.myspace.com). MySpace adds a little more to the mix than just a blog – you’re encouraged to give more details of yourself, your interests and desires and many use it as a way to make acquaintances or even for online dating.

MSN Messenger

Like Skype, this is a way of talking computer-to-computer. Like Skype, you can use a Webcam to see the person with whom you’re talking, but unlike Skype, MSN Messenger doesn’t offer the capability to call telephones. Many people use MSN Messenger because it comes ready-installed on their Windows computers, but there are similar offerings from Yahoo! and AOL.

Megapixels

A Pixel is a PIcture CELl – a single point on a digital image. Digital images are composed of rows and columns of pixels like computer screens themselves e.g. 1,024 columns and 1,280 rows to give a total image size of 1,310,720 pixels; in marketing speak, this would be a 1.3 megapixel image – a Megapixel camera is one that has more than a million pixels. Digital photos are ‘samples’ of the real world taken by digital cameras, with each point being a sample of the view being photographed. This means that there are gaps between the pixels, so the more pixels you have the better the quality of the resulting image.

HD television

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Toshiba HD television
After buying a DVD player and a DVD recorder and a Sky Plus box and a flat screen plasma television, the next thing your kids will be nagging you to get will be an HD television. It’s all a question of definition – the definition of a ‘standard’ television screen is 768x576 pixels (for PAL,which we have in the UK). HD TVs have a 1920x1080 matrix of pixels to make up their images (and DVDs 720x576, just to confuse even more), and gives an impressively clearer, sharper, better-defined picture than the one you’ve grown used to. Right now, HD TVs are expensive and there’s not an awful lot of programming available, but like the changeover from black-and-white to colour, eventually it’ll be available for all programmes. Right now, HD programmes can be watched on regular televisions in a sort of dumbed-down resolution, but this may not always be the case. Oh, and the HD in your computer is its Hard Disc, the place where it permanently stores all information from programmes to your pictures, music and emails.

CDs and DVDs

Compact Discs have been with us since the 1980s. They store 70–80 minutes of music or 700–800MB (MegaBytes) of data. DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs – originally Digital Video Discs) are the same size as CDs and became popular from the late 1990s. They can store 2 hours 13 minutes of video or 4.7 Gigabytes of data.

Digital information is stored by burning ‘pits’ into the aluminium layer of the disc with a laser. These pits are then read by another laser in your CD/DVD player and the series of 1s and 0s translated into music, video or other data. DVDs have many more pits and much finer ‘resolution’ for burning and reading than CDs, and hence can store more information. Usually DVD players will read and play CDs, but the opposite isn’t always true.


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