{"id":4452,"date":"2013-04-03T00:01:14","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T07:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=4452"},"modified":"2013-03-30T11:11:36","modified_gmt":"2013-03-30T18:11:36","slug":"big-picture-generic-terms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=4452","title":{"rendered":"Big Picture Generic Terms"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a nerd who writes technical books, I’ve had to hone my craft over the last several years. It’s not so much that technology changes; it does! Frequently! But the terms change over time with that technology. To keep up, I’ve gone Big Picture Generic.
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\nFor example, I once wrote about floppy disks. They were fascinating things, requiring an entire chapter in PCs For Dummies<\/em>. As that technology faded away — and thank God — it was replaced with other technology: ZIP disks, Magneto-Optical disks, and eventually thumb drives.<\/p>\n

Rather than keep changing the terms over and over, I settled on the Big Picture Generic Term: removable storage<\/em>. That covers all the bases.<\/p>\n

Ditto for the hard drive.<\/p>\n

Face it, the hard drive will probably not be your computer’s main storage device in coming years. Main strorage is going to be digital, the Solid State Drive (SSD). Also, portable devices — tablets and phones — don’t have hulking, spinning hard drives. (And thank God for that, too.) So the Big Picture Generic Term is internal storage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Long ago I was frustrated by writing “your CD or DVD drive.” So I used the Big PIcture Generic Term optical disc<\/em>. That covers the bases.<\/p>\n

By the way, you have to write disc<\/em> instead of disk<\/em> because the Brits developed the optical disc. We owe them that.<\/p>\n

I have trouble describing removable storage to a certain degree. The category includes optical discs, but also memory cards, aka media cards. So what are they? For now, I’m sticking to media cards, though I’d love to use the generic cards<\/em> instead. That’s just too vague. I’ll think of something eventually.<\/p>\n

The mobile technology devices presented a problem when I initially started writing about them. Those gizmos don’t have buttons, they have a touchscreen. On the touchscreen you can see the traditional graphical controls you’d find on a computer: a button, a check box, a scrolling whirly doodle. But do the same terms apply?<\/p>\n

Recently, an editor and I came up with a solution. Everything on the touchscreen is an icon<\/em>. That’s the Big Picture Generic Term. However, if the icon features text, then it’s a button<\/em>. I’m not certain how solid that rule will hold.<\/p>\n

The technology that’s thwarted me the most, however, is the computer monitor. Three terms exist to describe the thing: Monitor, Screen, Display.<\/p>\n

Presently, I refer to the entire thing as the monitor, as in “Set the monitor on your desktop at a pleasing angle and distance.” The screen is the part of the monitor that shows information, as in “Clean your sneeze globs off the screen.” And the display is the information displayed by the computer on the screen, as in “You should see an ugly error message on the display.”<\/p>\n

I’m just not happy with the differences between monitor, screen, and display. A more useful, hopefully Big Picture Generic Term most likely looms in my future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a nerd who writes technical books, I’ve had to hone my craft over the last several years. It’s not so much that technology changes; it does! Frequently! But the terms change over time with that technology. To keep up, I’ve gone Big Picture Generic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4452"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4462,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4452\/revisions\/4462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}