This original article was first published in The Dot Connector Magazine, Issue #10.
When it comes to web sites and the amount of traffic they claim to have, what is the difference between unique visits, page views, and hits per day? Which measure is the most honest?
A unique visit is when one person accesses content on a particular web site in a given time period, whether we’re talking about one image or 300 different web pages.
A page view is when a person views one particular web page on a web site.
Hits, on the other hand, are when any “user agent”, such as a web browser or search engine crawler, sends a request for some kind of data to a web site. One page load may consist of multiple hits: one hit for the main HTML page, one hit for the style sheet, and multiple hits for each image on the page.
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Scottie How Does it Work? hits, internet, visits, web
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of upgrading old electrical wiring in a residence, you know that a separate earth ground wire was generally not used in the past. In such cases, you find yourself with 2 wires: live, and neutral.
Now, you might want to install a grounded outlet without redoing a lot of wiring. A common method of getting around this little problem is to install the new 3-conductor outlet by tying live to one prong, neutral to the other prong, and then using a jumper wire to connect neutral to the ground connection inside the outlet.
“Theoretically, this should work just fine!” you reason.
It turns out that theoretically, you are in fact correct. Practically speaking, adding a “ground” in a 2-wire installation by tying neutral and ground together has several serious – and possibly dangerous – drawbacks.
Here’s the scoop.
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Scottie How Does it Work? electricity, safety
NOTE: Being a techie and an engineer, I’m often asked questions about how things work. These types of questions are the best, because as you might imagine, engineering types are generally obsessed with how things work. So, I have created a new category on my site here entitled “How Does it Work?”
The first post in this new category is the answer to a question that a friend just asked me the other day: How does a microprocessor actually work?
Everyone nowadays is familiar with microprocessors. Everything now uses a processor of some kind: computers, MP3 players, cell phones, washing machines, food processors, and even some electric toothbrushes!
One question I get asked a lot is: how do these processors actually work? Everyone knows that there is a thing called a microchip, and that it has transistors. But how do you go from a bunch of ones and zeros to a video playing in the web browser on your cell phone? I hope to explain here in very simple terms how a microprocessor works without getting too technical – and therefore too boring!
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Scottie How Does it Work? processor
