Daily Dose of English 92
Software
Daily Dose of English 92
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about software. To continue our little where episode or series rather, I thought we'd talk about software today, because it's kind of an interesting, or it's a really interesting area of conversation, but the word doesn't really clarify what it is. So, software is the word that we use to talk about computer programs, pretty much exclusively. Some kind of thing that's on a computer that makes it function like a computer. And the way that it gets its name actually comes from its opposite, which is hardware, which isn't really its opposite, I guess, but hardware is the stuff that is physically makes a computer. And so that's things like the CPU, the GPU, the mouse, the keyboard, the screen, the technology inside the screen. All of that is physical hardware, because the word where has to do with things in this case, W-A-R-E. So we're gonna be talking about kitchenware, for example. And then software is the opposite of hardware. Hard is like, it's a hard thing. In person, it's physical. You can touch it. It has mass. It's a real thing. Software is not real. It is just code on a computer somewhere. And that's why we call it software. Often, if you talk about something that is soft, it's something that's not tangible, it doesn't feel real. So another use of this is a soft skill. So a soft skill is something that is more about dealing with emotions or organizing your thoughts well rather than like being able to do something. A hard skill is something like being able to weld or working with wood or things like that, fixing toilets, plumbing, knowing plumbing well is a hard skill. It's a physical thing that you can do in the real world. Soft skills are more like leadership and management and organization, stuff that is harder to make us a checklist for. And so we call those hard skills and soft skills. Both are very important. Our world could not function without hard skills and soft skills, just like computers can't function without software and hardware. Software is essentially how we talk to the computer to tell it what to do. Because computers are very, very complicated. There's so many things going on. And we need a way to tell it what to do. Because you can kind of think of it like a brilliant genius that has to be told exactly what to do or it won't do anything. So, software is one of the biggest things in the world. We use software every single day, all the time, for so many aspects of our lives. I'm using software to record this episode. You're using very complicated software to listen to and watch this episode. Right? Because what's happening is we're using hardware to, to take some inputs essentially, but then the software is taking my voice, converting it into little zeros and ones, adding this video to it, adding the music and all these things. And then I'm uploading it to YouTube, which takes software as well. And there's so many things going on that contribute to this podcast being in your ears right now as physical sound waves. And a lot of that is software. There's a lot of big software that we deal with. And the biggest software, I guess the most influential software is what we might call an operating system. So this is the system that you use to talk to your computer in the most general sense. So an operating system is something like Windows or Mac OS or Linux. And that's what you interact with. You might also interact with Android on your phone or iOS on your Apple device if you have one. and they're very large complicated pieces of software that have to connect everything. Your operating system has to be able to do pretty much everything because other software is built on top of your operating system. There's even more like layers to it if you get into computer science and you look at the programming that talks physically to the computer components, then there's an abstraction, there's a whole bunch of different layers to it. So I'm simplifying, but the operating system is very important for anything that you deal with. I'm sure that you've fought with your operating system before. You've tried to do something on your computer and it's just not working even though it should. You're just yelling at your computer saying, why don't you work? Why don't you work? Please, please work. But sometimes software gets in the way because it's not perfect. A lot of other software that we use is things like the internet. The internet is based off of some pretty complicated and interesting software. It's a lot of programs that interact with computers all around the world to allow us to connect to websites from anywhere in the world. there are billions of different websites, of different web pages, and all of them have to connect via software in some way, which is pretty amazing when you think about it, right? The fact that you can go to, a website and it just loads right away for you from pretty much anywhere in the world is pretty impressive. You're accessing software on another computer somewhere in the world almost instantaneously. It takes 0.2 seconds to load if your internet is fast enough, which is pretty amazing and it impacts our lives heavily. There's also a lot of reliance on software, which can be a bad thing. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can also be an annoying thing and create bad experiences, I guess is a better way. It can be a bad thing, sure. There's definitely evil software and there's also good software. But going into an example, some software does not need to exist necessarily. and it can get in the way. For example, a lot of smart devices are introducing software, usually not great software, in order to interact with your hardware. So the classic example is lights, smart lights. Those are pretty popular nowadays. I actually have many smart lights in my apartment. And smart lights are basically regular light bulbs that connect to the internet, but you can control them from your phone. And there's a lot of great things about them. So with my smart lights, I can set exactly what color I want the lights, I can set how bright I want them, I can tell them when to turn on and when to turn off. So there's little programs that they can execute. My light turns on early every morning, so it's sort of like I'm waking up with the sun. Um, my office lights turn off when it gets late, just in case I forget. Um, so there's some pretty handy things that these lights can do. You can even, um, add some fun colors, right? But the problem is that if the internet is out or the power goes out, your lights lose sort of, they forget what they're doing. So if the internet is out, for example, I can't turn off the lights unless I physically go to the switch and turn it off. But for my office lights, I don't like to do that because it means that the next morning they won't come on automatically and I have to go find the switch, which is sort of hidden, and so it's a bit annoying. Same things with my bedroom light. Just yesterday actually, the cleaning lady was here and she unplugged the light to clean and plugged it back in, which turned it on because it was off before, but then she unplugged it, plugged it back in, it forgets and it turns itself on because it's simple, simple software. And then she turned it off physically with the switch, which meant that, and I didn't know, which meant that in the morning it wasn't on, which is what I want it to do. And so it was very easily fooled by some simple reality, which makes it a little bit of a pain. Whenever I leave my house for more than a day, I make sure to unplug all my lights because if the power cycles, so the power goes out for even a second, all my lights will suddenly be on. So I have to make sure that I unplug everything just to be safe. And so that's an example of software being introduced or added to hardware and making it a little bit annoying. However, in that case, I do like it. But if you get into a lot of other smart features like smart blinds or smart doors, smart locks, I can't imagine trying to go with that just because of the numerous fail cases that can come up. And I would just find it annoying. Anyway, that's what I have to say on software. I could talk about this for a lot longer. I know I kind of rambled, but we have some episodes coming up on other kinds of wares. So I thank you very much for listening to this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe learned a word here or there and enjoyed yourself. I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye then.
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