Misused Technology Terms

Hello my friends,

Welcome to TechQuickly, the coolest texture on the web.

My friend one day tells me, “OMG!!!!!! My Facebook got hacked”.

What that really mean is he left his computer/phone unlocked and his idiot friend thought it would be funny to send some messages to his sister. So in today’s post I am going to tackle a number of commonly misused tech terms to clear up any confusion and help all of you win your next internet fight.

Let’s start then by venerable hard-disk. There are lot of people who use the term hard drive to refer to any sort of non-removable storage in a computer. But it only refers to mechanical spinning drives.

If we break it down, the word 'Hard' refer to rigidity of the disk or the magnetic platters inside the internals of floppy disks by contrast were flexible.

So, don’t refer to SSDs (Solid-State Drives) as hard disks or hard drives. If you want to talk generally about mechanical drives and SSDs as a group, you say “Drive”.

Now speaking with internal PC components for a moment. Let’s talk about your GPU or is it your graphics card. It’s common to hear people use GPU to refer to this.

But the GPU actually only refer to the graphics processing unit, the chip given in below image.

For example, GP 104 which Nvidia brands as a gtx 1070 or 1080 depending on how many of its processing cores are enabled from the factory. So, it’s fine to call an RX 480 as a GPU. But if you talking about a specific model like given below then, you’re better of calling the whole assembly as a video card or graphics card.

In the case of highly integrated devices like smartphones, the graphics accelerator is usually part of SOC (System on a Chip). So, stick with GPU in that case, rather than calling your Adreno 420, we should call it ‘a graphics card’.

Let’s move on to removable media namely ‘Optical Disk’. I’m bringing them up to highlight the difference between “Disc” with a C and “Disk” with a K. They both sound the same and for this reason both words are used interchangeably quit often to refer to CDs, DVDs and Blue-Rays. But “Disc” with a C actually specifically refers to optical media, While “Disk” with a K is used for magnetic media such as floppy disk and hard disks.

You might understandably be a bit confused over how the letters HD seem to appear on everything from cheap 1366 by 768 TVs to outrageously expensive 8K displays. Well, while the term HD isn’t technically incorrect, as long as resolution is at least 720p.

TV manufacturers often use the term HD without any qualifiers to mean 720p exactly and it makes lower end screen sound more appealing. If you want to know unequivocally what each HD variant really means then, HD is 720p, we’ve covered Full HD is 1080p, q HD or quad HD means 1440p and last UHD or Ultra HD means 2160p and up. I guess words like full and ultra, sound a lot sexier to potential buyers than a jumble of numbers, but it’s confusing nonetheless.

To make things more baffling terms like 2K and 4K actually refer to cinematic resolutions used in the movie industry. It meaning that true 4K is actually little wider than most 4K monitors or TVs on the market.

If you’ve seen 1440p monitor advertised as 2K, well take a moment to shake your head and the discuss as the actual 2K resolution used in cinema is nowhere close to 1440p. Real 2K is actually just a slightly wider 1080p.

So then are there any misused tech terms that drive you all crazy, put them in comment section below.

I hope you like this Post. Please like and share it. If you have any questions or suggestions for my next post, then please comment it below.