It’s been a while since we had any geek speak on the World of Words, so today I thought I’d share an article from the BBC technology news section.
I use a 3.5G (HSDPA) Internet connection so this news was particularly interesting for me. I would love a connection ten times faster than the one I have now so I can’t wait for this technology to be released to the rest of the world!
There was some interesting technical vocabulary in this article, too. The first interesting word was ‘dongle‘. A ‘dongle‘ is a small electronic device that must be plugged into a computer in order for a specific function to work. In this case, it’s to receive a signal to transfer data. In other cases it might be to act as an authorisation key for a certain piece of software.
The next interesting word is ‘downlink‘. This means the transfer of data from the Internet to your computer. The opposite is ‘uplink‘.
Slightly later on, the author uses the word ‘pilot‘ meaning ‘to try out’ or ‘to test’. Sometimes, we can also use ‘pilot’ as an adjective when we talk about a ‘pilot scheme’ or ‘pilot episode‘.
The last expression I would like to look at today is ‘on the move‘. This means ‘whilst travelling’.
What kind of Internet connection do you use?
Today’s image is by CLUC.