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g63psc
|
I just completed a recently uploaded torrent which had 0 seeders, with more than 25.00 availability. How the hell did that happen?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Seeders are the number of people with the complete file. Availability is a measure of if the connected users have the complete file between all of them in combination. It is the number of people who have the least available piece of the file. So nobody had the complete file but there were plenty of people from which to download any piece you needed.",
"People with an incomplete part of the torrent can still share what they have. These people generally don't count as part of the number of seeds"
],
"score": [
15,
5
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"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
|
g64jak
|
why we don’t hear white noise in real life until we take a video
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo79c1z",
"fo7amih"
],
"text": [
"If our brains ignored the white noise, they would ignore it on the video too - the recording process adds white noise. This isn't universal, there's no white noise when watching a movie because it's been recorded on top-end equipment. Most recording devices use small cheap microphones. The smaller a microphone is, the less sensitive it is, and therefore it needs much more amplification of the signal. Lots of amplification with cheap components introduces noise.",
"Not all of that noise is really there If you record something that's quiet then turn up the volume on the playback, most of the noise you hear wasn't really sound in the environment. All recording devices (cameras, microphones, and others) have some internal noise in their measurements so measuring really faint signals (quiet sounds or pictures at night) makes the noise a lot more apparent."
],
"score": [
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g688qg
|
what is the big clunky thing on a laptopcharger ans why is it not on my phonecharger?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo7ww9r",
"fo7x4f2"
],
"text": [
"The large box on the laptop charger is a transformer to change the alternating current from the wall into direct current for the laptop. There is a similar sort of device in your phone charger except your phone uses much less power so it can be smaller. For phones this means it can be in the small block you plug into the socket itself.",
"It's an electric transformer, in your laptop it changes the strong electricity in your house (110V or 220v depends on where you live) to a weaker safer electricity level like 5-10v In phones the transformer is in the thing you plug into the wall and the USB cable, so it technically is in your phone charger"
],
"score": [
11,
5
],
"text_urls": [
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[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g6aghf
|
Does every code/program break down into binary for the computer? Can anything simpler than binary ever exist ?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo8bnzd"
],
"text": [
"At the absolute lowest level, everything your computer 'reads' is binary. The only way we have of communicating with computers is by choosing to either run electricity to it or not. When a particular transistor has electricity running through it, it's a 1, when it doesn't, it's a 0. From there we can form complex logic gates that build and build until we have complicated systems. The only thing simpler than binary would be a single state. If every bit was always X and could never change, your computer could never do anything. What's amazing is how much we've done with only two states available to use. What if we had three states? Off, on and something in between? This is a quantum computer, and is the next huge step in our understanding of computer science."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g6dr1e
|
How is old music digitally remastered to sound good?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo92q6n"
],
"text": [
"Old music (video as well) was often recorded into a format that had very good quality (called a master) but to replicate the media into a format that can be afforded by consumers meant that some quality had to be lost. At time went on the quality of consumer formats has progress and caught up with Enterprise formats of decades gone. If the old master still exist you can simply replicate the media to whatever new format now exist that is on par with the master recording."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g6e9o7
|
Setting aside politics, what are the major hurdles to election voting by the internet or by phone app?
|
Is it faith in the ID verification process?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo90hk5"
],
"text": [
"Security. As virtually any computer security expert if voting via the internet is a good idea and they will just burst out in maniacal laughter. There are just too many ways for such a system to be hackable. Particularly since every state would probably do their own. Vote by mail is a much more secure and sensible system, and is widely deployed in many places with few issues."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g6eyss
|
What makes a computer's processing speed "fast", and why?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo953ve"
],
"text": [
"The cpu is the brain of the computer and does all the processing and calculations. The reason why it’s fast is because they literally compute millions of data per second. Your question is a little vague so if you want a more thorough answer I’d need a more detailed question."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g6gwwj
|
why does the source code for CSGO and TF2 being leaked mean that servers may be unsafe to play on? Like, what does the source code allow people to do that they couldn't do before?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fo9i14c",
"foamcc6",
"fo9nqq5",
"fo9jujc",
"fo9omjy",
"fo9zgza"
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"text": [
"The source code being available means that everyone can see how the server operates. Which means people can see directly what vulnerabilities there may be rather than just guessing. It makes a hackers job easier, basically. The flip side of this is that having your code open sourced means that lots of good programmers and security experts can audit the code and recommend changes to the publisher. It’s a double-edged sword basically.",
"Think of it like giving a floor plan/map of your house to a robber. They wouldn’t have to guess how to break in and where to look for valuables.",
"Looking at the source code makes it much faster to understand exactly how the program works. This includes bugs in both the client **and** the server that can allow for arbitrary code execution and thus malware. Now that it's many times easier to understand the code for them, people can find a bug that sends bad data to a server and take it over. Then they can find a bug in the client that lets a taken-over server send bad data to the client and run malware on the player's computer.",
"Nothing immediately. If the security of CSGO was based around concealing the source code, it was probably already being exploited anyway.",
"What people are mainly afraid of, to my knowledge, is hackers using Remote Code Execution to screw with your computer. With the source code being leaked, people can see the vulnerabilities that they can exploit and write programs that let them run their own scripts that can force the game to execute code on other people's computers. This opens up a lot of possibilities for using the game's servers to do unsavory things to other people, from crashing their game to infecting their computer with malware to deleting their files. Crazy stuff, though a lot of this comes from my pre-existing knowledge of RCE from Heartbleed (a similar bug in OpenSSL from 6 years ago that largely worked the same way, using a vulnerability in the software to execute code remotely on people's computers).",
"The source code is like blueprints. If a gang of smart bank robbers got their hands on the blueprints of a bank, they can identify weak spots and hidden passages to break in and steal all the money."
],
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
g6ltgv
|
How were computers first coded?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foaeom0",
"foaffgt",
"foakaly",
"foan95p"
],
"text": [
"Instead of coding the way we do now, they used punch cards to program the computer. These were paper cards with holes in precise locations and the computer could read these as code. This way you could code without a computer, and you didn't need a screen for it.",
"These holes would switch logic gates (sounds silly) to certain positions so that when you apply a current, calculation could be made. If you want to learn more about gates, and ho you use them to make simple calculations. Search for minecraft videos explaining logic gates, it's a great way to learn about them!",
"Depends on what your idea of a computer is. Mechanical computers, and all early computers whether analog or digital, were coded simply by construction. So they were modeled for a problem trying to be solved. You set a dial(s), pulled a lever, slide a scale (slide rule), rotated a gear... Problem being, you can't change the problem without changing construction. Some looms (weaving) are great examples of programmable complex mechanical computers leading the way to computer tech. Late Edit: here you go, URL_0 and URL_1 . You can almost see the bits flow in that Babbage Engine and telephone switch gear.",
"Why do you think you need a screen? The early ones were literally programmed via a series of manual toggle switches and had illuminated bulbs to indicate data coming out (not even LEDs, they didn't exist). The Apollo mission computers were literally KNITTED with the right wires joined in the right order to perform the actions they needed to. Punchcards, printers, etc. Screens were a later addition to computers, starting with oscilloscope-like displays that couldn't really show an image, only a few lines. The computer in your car engine doesn't have a display, nor does your GPS tracker or your Ring doorbell. They can still be programmed, and output data."
],
"score": [
8,
4,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQzpLLhN0fY",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qctHEGKr9Zs"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g6mj32
|
Pluto is really really far away, like so far that not much light from the sun should get there. why are images of Pluto so well lit?
|
The picture in question: URL_0
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foaos4n",
"fobjqp4",
"foamthl",
"foakl8i"
],
"text": [
"Pluto is fairly well lit, mostly because the sun is stupidly bright, and the cameras on the probes are optimized for lower light levels than a camera on Earth would be. Pluto is about as well lit as the surface of the Earth just after sunset but before it gets really dark. This means that it's better lit than the inside of most offices(your eyes are weird so it may not seem that way) and combined with a large camera at close range with longer exposures you can capture plenty of light to make it look well lit. NASA cameras also use a cheat to get better pictures. Instead of a sensor with Red, Green, and Blue elements on it they have multiple skinny sensors that capture a narrow strip of Red, a strip of Blue, a strip of Near IR, and then they overlay all of those strips and stitch them together. This gives them more sensitive and lower noise sensors for each color band, and more wavelengths than you can see with your eye to let them add some details.",
"Pluto isn't as dark as you might think. The sun is 1500x dimmer than on the earth, but that is still more than 500x brighter than the moon. The surface would appear as twilight to someone standing there, and with no other light sources around, your eyes would quickly adjust. A sensitive camera would have no problem taking good pictures.",
"NASA paid scientists at JHU/APL to build a spaceship and fly it all the way to Pluto. That spaceship contained a camera, called [Lorri]( URL_0 ), which was specially engineered to take pictures at the light levels expected at Pluto. It's not some off-the-shelf smartphone camera. From the post you cite: > It's quite amazing how much detail is added when you can get the camera 5 billion km closer.",
"Long exposure, and stacked images. This is the same way we get beautiful images of deep space objects"
],
"score": [
6,
5,
4,
3
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[],
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"http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft.php#Payload"
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g6mr2k
|
Why some computer games need to be restarted to apply new video settings while some don't?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foc0qhf"
],
"text": [
"This comes down to how the application was written and specifically, resource management. When a game is up and running, it got there by loading a bunch of pictures (the textures) and shaders (simply, graphical effects) and 3D models off your hard drive (or SSD) and mashing them together. The current settings you use determine which shaders, models and textures are loaded and how they can be processed before they are actually used to display something. Different settings may use different files. In any graphics API (Open GL, DirectX, Vulkan, etc.), when you want to load a shader or texture or model, it's given a unique ID. If you unload a shader to change it to another, it now has a new ID that has to be applied to everything that used it so the graphics API knows what items you need to draw something. There may also be different settings (less or more) that are applied to the new shader and the game has to do a little processing before it can start drawing again. The game engine may be written really flexibly (Doom Eternal) and is able to unload the current files, reload the files it needs for the new settings, re-apply the new IDs and keep going. Maybe they wanted to save time during development (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey) and it requires a restart. Why would someone do this? For a larger company like id Software and Ubisoft, it can come down to decisions made solely for the company or what kind of experience they want the players to have. Maybe their workflow mandates that the game designers can see changes in-game immediately because maybe the graphics programmers are always busy. So early on the programmers made it so that the artists can just update a shader file, push some hidden command in-game and reload stuff. Maybe they have some external tools they think are good enough and want to use them to save time on the graphics programmers and don't want/need to see it in-game for some reason, so the game engine was never given that flexibility. Source: wrote a small game engine and wrote support to reload the shaders while the game is running. I don't actually have to \"apply\" the new shader IDs because each object doesn't point *directly* to a shader. There's a layer in between. This was the flexibility I made to support dynamic shader reloads. It requires a full restart to change textures but can also dynamically reload changes to the UI."
],
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5
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
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|
g6n3mv
|
How does a phone screen really work?
|
I cracked my screen and thought for sure something inside of my iPhone XR was broke, but the tech came to my apartment and 30 minutes later, my phone was back to new. It got me wondering, how does the screen really work? Is the picture in the glass itself and that’s why it can just be replaced and back to normal? Is there something behind that glass that had to be replaced too? Where the hell does the picture even come from. Sorry if I’m asking too many questions but I’m so intrigued after my screen was literally cracked and there were black spots and green and black lines all over it, and just by replacing the glass it’s back to normal.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foav8fc",
"foatl08"
],
"text": [
"The phone screen consists of a bunch of components that are all stacked and glued together. On the outer most layer you obviously have the glass that keeps things feeling nice. Behind that glass you have the digitizer which is what handles the touchscreen part, and the OLED or LCD display. All of these are stacked and adhered together so \"replacing the screen\" is swapping out all of these parts. [This Samsung page has a nice image showing how LCD screens are built up and all the layers used to create the image]( URL_0 ). In an OLED phone everything from the color filter back is replaced by the [OLED assembly]( URL_1 ) which doesn't need the back reflector or light guides because an OLED produces the light rather than filtering the light",
"There is a layer of glass, usually has an oleophobic coating on top to avoid getting too greasy from fingerprints, then comes the screen. You phones uses AMOLED technology, but there are other smartphones that use LCD. Both have a dense layer of tiny groups of colored light emitters that work together to create the images. When you break the glass on top of the screen, since the screen is so close to the glass its probable that it damages it and the source of its energy, when that happens it can spread trought all of the screen. Some other times you get a thin line across the glass and it doesn't affect the screen."
],
"score": [
26,
5
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://pid.samsungdisplay.com/en/learning-center/blog/lcd-structure",
"https://www.oled-info.com/files/OLED-device-structure-img_assist-400x295.jpg"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g6r5fs
|
in the Nintendo 64 game console, why does "tilting" the cartridge cause so many weird things to happen in-game?
|
Watch any internet video on the subject to see an example of such strange game behavior. Why does this happen? EDIT: oh my this blew up didn't it? Thanks for all the replies!
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"fobvukh",
"foc4p6g",
"focuhze",
"foc738y",
"focaiug",
"foe2096"
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"text": [
"A cartridge communicates with the system with dozens of little gold plated pins. When you tilt the cartridge, you unseat some of the pins from the connector, making intermittent contact with some. This sends garbled signals to the console, especially with the graphics as there wasn’t much error correction",
"\"this is a sentence with the first letter of every word removed.\" \"his s entence ith he irst etter f very ord emoved.\" by removing communication lines (letters) some words disappear, some become misspelled weirdness, and some become whole new words. Now imagine sending the garbled second line to someone who just learned english and asking them what it means. The computer inside the N64 will only do what it is told, but if it is told \"his s entrance it he first setter f very rod moved.\" we see behavior we term glitches.",
"Unlike other consoles, the N64 *doesn't* run any code directly off the cartridge - instead it copies it to memory and runs it from there. During normal gameplay, the console may not be reading from the cartridge at all. In theory, you could just remove the cartridge entirely and keep playing the game normally, with only a few glitches occurring whenever the game tries to load some extra data from the cart. The only reason you can't do this is because of a pin on one side of the console. That pin exists for the sole purpose of detecting whether the cartridge was removed, and shutting off if so. By titling the cart, though, you keep this pin connected (to prevent this shutdown) but disconnect the other pins so that data can't be transfered from the cart anymore. The game keeps running thanks to the code in RAM, but all attempts to load additional data from the cart return garbage.",
"The cartridges haves pins so that the console can send small amounts of electricity through the cartridge and back to the console. This way the console can \"read\" what is written to the game cartridge. The game's content is \"written\" to the cartridge. When read properly, the signals get sent through the console and the game is played. The game's content is code and assets. Code is instructions about how the game should be played, how the things in the game interact with each other, how the things in the game should react when different buttons on the controller are pressed, etc. Assets are instructions that describe what the music should sound like and what the graphics should look like (Sprites, 3d models with textures). When you tilt the cartridge, you interfere with the ability for the console to read the cartridge correctly. This means the instructions get a little bit jumbled up. Even small changes in instructions can make a drastic difference in the result. Here's a metaphor. Letters and words can also be thought of as \"instructions\". Because they instruct you how to read and understand the content that I've written. But even small changes, such as a single letter being different, can have a big effect. Imagine someone says to you in a text message: \"I have bad news, your son has died.\" instead of \"I have bad news, your son has lied.\". In a conversation we could keep we could keep texting each other back until the confusion is resolved. But the game can't. It hasn't to keep going on as if the mistake was correct.",
"The only cartridge you are allowed to tilt is Superman 64. No one cares if that gets ruined. Heck, throw it out a window. Inside of the cartridges, there are gold pins that conduct electricity (gold is highly conductive). This electricity carries information. These gold pins force the electricity to flow in a certain direction at certain times, if they are fully connected. But, you probably know that electricity can \"jump\" between two conductive points, if the current is strong enough to bridge the gap. When tilting the cartridge, you create a gap, but the electricity is still strong enough to make it across. However, the electricity doesn't have something to control where it goes, as it has to leave the gold pin to \"jump\" to the console receivers. Because of this, the information can be lost or scrambled, and sometimes can flow down the wrong pin receivers. This is why you get graphical/audio errors. This can damage the console and the cartridge, although it is unlikely as the current flowing isn't very strong. Just know that if you are wanting to tilt a cartridge, do with knowing the risk that you may break either the cartridge, the console, or both.",
"Original Nintendo owner here. Let me tell you about the piece of cardboard, q-tip, or other perfectly calibrated instruments that would allow your game to function properly."
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[
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] |
g6yo0o
|
How do prosthetics work?
|
How do prosthetic hands, arms, legs, etc. work and how is the user able to control it without it actually being apart of their body?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fodsunk"
],
"text": [
"it depends on the type of prosthetic for how they attach, some are just form fitting attached to the body, others use straps, other screw or snap onto parts that are actually implanted to the body, there is a wide variety. for being able to control a prosthetic their are a couple different ways to, and im going to assume you mean control like opening/closing a hand. many real simple prosthetics don't even have this moving ability so it is just a function working with what you got. Others use physical buttons/levels to activate the hand movement. for example someone who lost an arm may move their shoulder in a specific way that pushes a button that causes the hand to open/close. Some prostethics are now even advancing to the point where they can be triggered by sensing nerve impusles, so a person could just think about opening their hand and open the prosthetic, I am not sure how common these are or how far this has advanced in the past couple years so google might be a friend."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g75b68
|
--- How do metal detectors work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fof2cw6"
],
"text": [
"Essentially theres a magnetic field on the inside. If you pass a metal object, or pass through with a metal object then a change happens in the field and an electric current is produced. The current depends on the size and speed of the object that is passing through. So metal detectors are set such that if a certain size of metal passes through such that a minimum amount of electricity is generated then it rings an alarm Eg. If you pass through with a single safety pin, the detector doesnt react because the current produced is too small to trigger the alarm. But if you pass through with say a box with a hundred pins then the electricity generated from the change in field triggers the alarm"
],
"score": [
5
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"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
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|
g77fla
|
What is RAID storage and how does it work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fofbg1p"
],
"text": [
"RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is used to take multiple hard disks and make them appear as a single unit. This can be used to improve performance, provide protection against a drive failure, or a mix of both. The most common versions a normal person will run into are RAID 0 which splits all data between the two disks so it can read and write twice as fast, and RAID 1 which makes the two disks copies of each other so you don't lose data if one fails. Bigger environments will use RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10 depending on how many disks they're using and what they're aiming for."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g79tnn
|
Why are there now websites with suffixes like .cool or .xyz when that wasn’t a thing a few years ago?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fofrtnw",
"fofram3"
],
"text": [
"There's a global standards body that manages website suffixes called ICANN. In 2012, they opened up applications for new suffixes (gLTDs) and a bunch of companies applied. When an application was approved, the applicant could then setup their new website suffix and start selling websites that ended in it. That's why there are new gLTDs now that you didn't see before 2012. Here's a general history of the process: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) And here's the history of .xyz specifically: [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 )",
"Your website is actually 4 numbers called your IP address. Servers called DNS servers take the name of the website, and answer with it's address. Kind of like your phone number. You dont have to memorize all your friend's phone numbers, you can look up their name, and get their number from a directory. Initially two major DNS servers were created. .com & .Gov. later countries added their own servers like. .AU & .nz Now more companies are making their own servers, and getting major internet access companies to host them. Having your phone number in a phone book doesn't help if no one owns that book. Website owners pay to have their page hosted. Web hosts like godaddy, keep a copy of your page accessible, and also insure its address is in everyone's phone book."
],
"score": [
20,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Program",
"https://icannwiki.org/New\\_gTLD\\_Program",
"https://icannwiki.org/.xyz"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7apc2
|
How does a touchscreen work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fofwg7x",
"fofwkcm"
],
"text": [
"Fleshy stuff will affect how electricity travels in the vicinity of the the fleshy stuff. Touch screens pick up on this and translate that into clicking and dragging.",
"There's two types generally. Capacitive and resistive. Capacitive works with the screen using the electric properties of the \"toucher\" (body, stylus, etc.) while resistive is basically two \"films\" separated in the middle so they both \"touch\" at the point where the screen is pressed. A lot of medical facilities prefer resistive touch screens since they are mostly used with gloved hands. Resistive (for the most part) are not as clear as capactivie due to the films used in the screen. This may have changed more recently, but this was the case at least 5-10 years ago."
],
"score": [
13,
12
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7dn2n
|
How do Bluetooth and other Radio frequencies work?
|
Hello, everybody! I think it's safe to say that Bluetooth has been a bigger part of our lives than ever before. Products like the Apple AirPods have completely shaken the market and have opened space for True Wireless Headphones that everybody has/wants. I'm no different. Some time ago I bought the Redmi AirDots and I really like them. But, since my introduction to Bluetooth back in the Xbox 360 days, I have wondered: How does it work? I have only some basic notions about radio frequencies. I know they are radiations from the EM spectrum but how do they send information to devices? And how do they translate information into sound or input on a game or even an image? And, if Bluetooth is such a specific frequency, why can it have interference? I remember sometimes while using my headphones I have encountered very specific places that would always and inexplicably shut off the connection or leave it very poor. I always assumed it was some kind of interference with other radio signals that would be on the area, but who knows? Well... I guess you do! I'm always curious and eager to understand more about the world. Thanks for your attention! Hope you guys have a great day.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fogjm46",
"fogseda",
"fogik28"
],
"text": [
"Bluetooth is a type of radio waveform, and it operates at very, very low power in a particular radio band. The super low power level is for safety reasons, particularly for a radio transmitter that's in your ear because that's very near your potentially important brain. The world is full of radio waves. Some are narrowly controlled and others, which we tend to call electrical noise, cover a broad region of some radio bands. When you notice that your bluetooth doesn't work, look around for a motor, air conditioner, or some other machine that is just making noise at too high a level for your super efficient earbud radios.",
"You can conceptualize radio waves as being similar to light, except if we were to \"see\" in radio waves, we'd find that the sky would be very dark and most objects would appear ghostly and blurry. If you could see in radio waves, you would notice that the electronic devices around you were blinking incredibly quickly, perhaps with different colors. You'd notice that cell stations and broadcast antennas would shine very brightly and be dazzling with different colors blinking. Let's pretend we live in this world, and I want to send a message to you. I have a radio flashlight (i.e., an antenna connected to a transmitter), and you have your radio eyes (i.e., an antenna connected to a receiver). For us to communicate, we'd need to agree on a code that we both could know, like Morse code. I could use my radio flashlight to send dits and dahs to you, and since my radio waves can travel through most objects, we could be separated by walls and trees and such, but you'd still see my light through those ghostly things. The more powerful my light, the brighter you'd see it, and the more things it could cut through. In the case of things like music, well, we know that the music is just a waveform of a particular shape. The speakers in your ears have to move back and forth just right to make this particular sound wave. So what we'll do is take that sound wave and plot it out and find a set of points that can fairly well describe the sound wave, the same way you can take any graph and generate some ordered pairs that could be used to reconstruct the graph. If we've agreed on a code for our flashes of radio light, we can have a system where I feed you all the ordered pairs of the sound wave, and you can re-plot them to figure out what the sound wave needs to look like, and then reproduce it. That is all that any digital communication is doing: taking data, breaking it down into little chunks in an agreed upon way, and using an agreed-upon flashing code to send those pieces of data away. Now, you can do some fancy things with the system that you agree upon to transmit data, for example, Bluetooth jumps around to different frequencies (colors) to help avoid confusion with all the different flashes of radio waves that are around us all the time, but all digital signals are just sending little coded flashes out into the world, hoping that something who understands is able to see it. Bluetooth in particular is also low-powered, so the flashes are very dim and need sensitive antennas and good error-checking systems built into the codes use. They tend to not work as well outdoors because reflections off the walls help the signals be brighter within rooms. Sending analog, or non-digital, signals into the world would be trying to convey the shape of the waveform of the audio signal by changing the brightness of your radio signal in the same way (amplitude modulation, AM) or shifting the color of your signal a small bit, back and forth on the rainbow (frequency modulation, FM). The fact that AM receivers cannot distinguish between a brightness due to the signal source and a brightness due to something very bright over many colors, such as lightning, means that the signal is easier to interfere with.",
"So the audio/data is bundled up and encoded into the radio wave, blasted out the antenna on your phone, your AirPods pick it up and decode it and blast it back into your earholes. The AirPods bundle up and send back your voice if you're on a phone call, it also sends information like the battery percentage and some other miscellaneous information. So analog radio waves, like old school radio, adjust the strength of the radio wave to create the sound picked up by your car's radio. Digital radio is where they take the same amount of sound, package it up and encode it into the radio wave, thus taking up less space and leaving more bandwidth to use higher quality sound! Basic interference is exactly like you said, although Bluetooth is a very specific range, things like microwaves and other electronic equipment and it certainly puts out a range of radio frequencies as a byproduct of their operation. Which leads to the little tag you see on a lot of appliances and toys \"does not interrupt but must accept interference\" Edit: [part 15 of the FCC rules tag]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
7,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://saveamericanbusiness.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/FCC-Part-15-Notice.jpg"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g7l90d
|
How do so many metal products get mirrored finishes but the process to add a mirrored finish to a piece of metal is so labor intensive, with a number of different grit polishes and buffing?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foic6rr"
],
"text": [
"Mirroring and chroming are two different processes. To mirror metal you have to polish it through the grits, very labor intensive. To chrome you just dip it into a solution."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7lb9p
|
How do performing holograms (Prince, Michael Jackson, Tupac, etc) work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foir96c"
],
"text": [
"Projections. Holograms don’t exist in that sense. (The key is the scrim-like fabric they use which appears transparent to the audience but catches the light of the projected image)."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7lpe2
|
How does maintaining battery level at 60% or 80% help prolong battery life of my laptop while charging with the AC adapter
|
My ASUS laptop has battery settings that allow the battery to be maintained at 60 or 80% when connected to the AC adapter. I was curious as to how that maintains battery life (I remember charging past 100% places high stress on the battery)?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foilp07"
],
"text": [
"Batteries are like having two pools of water separated from each other by a water slide. The pools themselves are flimsy and are literally held up by the pressure of the water inside, pushing against the walls. When a pool is empty the walls are under strain and slowly start to crack and break as they fall inward. If you keep a bit of water in each pool, the walls are under less strain, but if the water is all in the bottom pool, or all in the top pool, then one of the pools is going to start weakening. This is how Ion transfer in a battery works. One part of the battery has \"+\" charges that want to get to the \"-\" side of the battery. When you connect the battery to something that connects it's positive to negative side, the charges start to flow, and in the process power whatever thing you just connected. When all the charges go to oneside, they have to be pumped back over to the otherside. This is what happens when you charge your battery. Batteries are not just a bunch of electricity bundled up in a brick. There is an actual chemical process and flow of particles that is occurring and if you go too far one way or the other the structure falls apart."
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g7nf9j
|
what am I hearing when the fax machine screeches at me?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foimm07"
],
"text": [
"That’s dial-up. That’s how the internet used to work. It’s literally using a number to call up another fax machine to send data."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7oi0e
|
How do radio stations transmit text to your car? (Example: the song and artist name showing up on your car’s screen.)
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foiuipg",
"foiyudl",
"foj0d9k",
"foj69a7",
"foitq5s"
],
"text": [
"The [Radio Data System (RDS)]( URL_0 ) uses a frequency modulated wave to carry a small amount of information along with the primary carrier wave without interfering with the analogue broadcast. Your radio decodes this digital information if it can, and if it can't, it doesn't even know it's there.",
"Sometimes you are watching something on TV, like a press conference (topical, right?) and there is a person standing to the side or in a box on the screen doing sign language. You can think of the music you're hearing as the person talking to the cameras and the text about the song as the signer. If you can sign AND hear, you can listen to that person and watch the signer at the same time (this is silly in my example but the point is they can both be doing their thing without taking anything away from the other). If you don't know sign but can still hear you can just ignore the signer (this would be like a radio that can't display the text).",
"The text that shows up on your screen is digital data, just like this comment you're reading. Your computer knows how to decode those 1s and 0s into text for you to read. Radio stations use clever techniques to transmit this digital data along with the analog signal. For your car radio it's just two signals. If your radio understands digital encoding, it will know the text is there and display it. If it doesn't then it won't even notice the text.",
"You can see the this information in the signal using a spectrum analyser, I believe it’s the closest harmonics either side of the carrier wave. Could someone let me know if I’m correct? Also I could take a picture of the signal on a spec-an if anyone would like to see it. We calibrate RF equipment in work but I don’t understand it fully.",
"Part of the digital signal is used to transmit the station, traffic news, music information etc."
],
"score": [
325,
27,
9,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7u1jb
|
In a computer, how does the airflow from a fan cool the coolant inside of the heat pipes of a water cooler?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fojl572"
],
"text": [
"Thankfully heat transfers to its surroundings. The heat sink, whether metal pieces or water filled pipes, will transfer heat to the cooler air around it. This process is faster if the air around it is cooler. By moving the warm air immediately next to the heat sink away and replacing it with cooler air, the fan speeds up the process of heat transfer away from the heat sink."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7vkr3
|
Why can't Twitter just remove all of the bot accounts?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fojujr5",
"fojvdd5",
"fojxiq8"
],
"text": [
"Please define a bot account in a way that a computer can understand. It is not as simple as one might first assume. They do remove a lot of account automatically but spammers will try to find ways around it and make them act more like humans.",
"It’s hard to identify what’s a bot and not. One could argue to use a verification system then, so to sign up for Twitter you have to show ID or something but then that’s a privacy issue. Then there’s a fact that business wise, they have an incentive to have high numbers, whether it’s a bot or not it makes them look good to advertisers which is where all their money comes from.",
"For one, there are a lot of helpful bot accounts. A news website may automatically tweet any front-page news stories they publish, for instance. Distinguishing legitimate tweeting applications from those trying to pass as human isn't a simple task."
],
"score": [
9,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g7y2ik
|
How are musicians playing live concerts, remote from one another, through streaming, without latency from the stream affecting their timing?
|
I just watched a live stream concert and it had me wondering how the musicians playing together were able to keep their timing so in sync while playing in separate locations. On streams with my friends usually there is a few second delay. I’m curious how these guys were able to overcome that problem.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fokkbt8",
"fokf6vr",
"fokn4l8",
"fok9o0e",
"fokp9qx"
],
"text": [
"They are not playing live. These are pre-recorded and edited together to look like they are live. Even with the best possible internet connections for all players, you still have to deal with the speed of light from each player and back to each other player. It's not going to happen in our lifetimes. Here's a good writeup on the subject: URL_0 PS: If someone knows of a live jamming service that has overcome this limitation in real time, please post it. I've checked them all out, and no one has been able to deliver on the hype. AudioMovers comes close, but there is still some latency each way that is variable, depending on each party's internet routing conditions.",
"We are almost universally sending in individually recorded videos and getting them edited together. Sometimes the conductor might conduct a video and send that out to use as a tempo and styling basis for the performers. I’ve tried to do it with ensembles live and it’s impossible. Any vids you are where it actually works, they are not actually doing it together at the same time.",
"There is a platform called Jamkazam which apparently eliminates most of the latency that would be an issue in a live performing situation. I have yet to try it, but will be doing it at some point this week most likely. I think that with the professional streams, they may record stuff prior to it actually being put out, then sync it up.",
"I’d imagine some there is a bit of delay until it’s sent to the stream most likely some puts everything in sync before it’s sent out",
"Even though the artists recorded their parts live in front of the camera and the audio that generates is added to the stream they're almost certainly playing to a click track and someone else is mixing it together so it's not truly live as in happening at the same time it's being broadcasted."
],
"score": [
34,
19,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://medium.com/@calebdolister/why-cant-musicians-jam-with-each-other-online-without-latency-or-other-issues-44260789a721"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g85xxd
|
Why can computers not make curves?
|
Every 3D modelling software simply uses a series of flat polygons, small enough to appear curved, to created spheres etc. Why? Why can technology even today find it easier to render literally millions of little triangles, than just one curve?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foluioe",
"folrl3d",
"folx8f8",
"folymak"
],
"text": [
"They can. In 2D, [vector graphics]( URL_3 ) can draw curves using [splines]( URL_1 ). If you use a vector graphics program like Adobe Illustrator, or an image format like [SVG]( URL_0 ) you'll see first-hand that you're working with smooth curves that never become jagged no matter how much you zoom in. For 3D graphics, one common technique is called [Constructive Solid Geometry]( URL_2 ). You can zoom into a CSG model as far as you want and it will continue to be smooth. Many CAD programs use a technique called [NURBS]( URL_4 ) to specify curve surfaces like airplane wings and car bodies. But developers often don't use these techniques because it's slower to render. The root cause is that polygons are natural fit for the kind of parallelization a modern graphics card can do, while techniques for dealing with curved surfaces are not. A modern graphics card will have over 1,000 processors working in parallel. A modern graphic pipelines will take the vertices of a 3D model, rotate and scale it in the scene, transform it into triangles, use a texture to paint it to a 2D screen with a z-buffer, then apply various shaders and effects on top of that, all inside the GPU, all at a parallelization factor of 1,000. It's very hard for fancier techniques to compete with that!",
"***There isn't really such a thing as a curve.*** Just things that look so much like curves from far away, that's what we call them. Paint a curve on a wall? It's just millions of drops of paint. Letters on paper? Millions of little blots of ink. The round bottoms of glass cups? Through a microscope, you'll see the individual grains of glass - more like a beach than a smooth line. The curve around the edge of the moon? It only looks like a perfect circle from down here. Up there, it's thousands of mountains. The same goes for all shapes. There's no such thing. There are no triangles or squares. Just triangle-shaped, square-shaped things. In the real world it's easy to find trillions of things, because things can be as small as a dust speck. In the computer world, everything must be counted before it is drawn. A computer can count high and fast, but it can't go forever. Eventually it has to stop counting and tell the monitor what to show you. If it works hard and draws ten million points and you can still see where each point is, it still won't look much like a curve. It will look pointy! But we have a few tricks up our sleeve. We tell computers to draw better curves by automatically snipping lines and curving them themselves. The more time we give them, the better this works, so expensive time-consuming CGI can have pretty realistic curves, whereas your average day-to-day computer experience will not be very curvy at all.",
"Your premise is incorrect. Not all 3D modeling software is limited to triangles. 3D Studio Max, for example, can model shapes with true curved surfaces. As for why most 3D engines use triangles instead of curves though, it's simply because they're faster and easier to deal with. A spline curve is exponentially more mathematically complex than a flat triangle. \"Technology even today\" isn't going to change that mathematical fact. And individual curved surfaces are rarely approximated with \"millions\" of triangles. With Gouraud or [Phong]( URL_0 ) shading an object can be made to look realistically curvy with only a few hundred or even dozen polygons.",
"They can. NURBS. Non Uniform Rational B-Splines. Also vector graphics use it too. The graphics drivers translate that into a raster for your screen or printer, but the curves themselves are mathematical equations. Not all 3D software is limited to polygons (specifically triangles and quads) Cinema 4D, for one, has full NURBS modeling tools. Edit: IMO this is the biggest missing thing from Blender. Being able to model with sweep NURBS, lathe, extrude and more all defined by vectors. It's amazing."
],
"score": [
121,
60,
14,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_(mathematics)",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_solid_geometry",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline"
],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g88679
|
Before the invention of the barcode, how did concerts and other events prevent scammers from simply printing out lookalike tickets and getting in for free?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fom1z18",
"fom95sc",
"fom5wlf",
"fomkznd",
"fom1sxl"
],
"text": [
"They did not have to. The barcode was invented in the 50s and had its first commercial use in 1974. High quality printers didn't really enter the home until the mid 90s. There really isn't a period of time where the barcode wasn't in use but people had access to printers they could use freely. There is also the burden of sourcing the correct card stock by weight and color.",
"For centuries the method has changed but the idea has been the same, make them as difficult to reproduce as possible without making then too complicated or costly to the supplier. I found [this slideshow]( URL_0 ) that shows a lot of examples from over the years.",
"> simply printing Printing wasn't simple. You'd have to buy out the print shop that printed them for the venue, or find a crooked print shop that would print them for you, and source the materials if you wanted them to match. To get an accurate counterfeit, of course, you'd want to buy a couple of real tickets as references, so the printer could get the right color and weight of cardstock, the right typefaces and inks, and duplicate any artwork, stamps, overprinting or marks. That would be pretty expensive just to get into a concert for free. Especially since tickets were so cheap. For example during the 60s and 70s, tickets typically ranged from $1.50 up to $10.00, with big name concerts often in the $3-$6 range. The Beatles were around $5 in the 60s, while Elvis tickets in 1977 were around $15.",
"I think the best answer for this, is that you watch the movie: [catch me if you can]( URL_0 ) And btw barcodes are easily falsified as in coupons. Barcodes are just a number in a certain format. You need a centralized database to know that they are not duplicated or \"invented/made out\" and other means to know that the tickets you have in your hands are \"original\" as special paper, special ink, special printing equipment, etc.",
"numbers. corresponding numbers on two pieces of the ticket, kinda like movies still do if you actually buy a ticket in person. but obviously it wasn't nearly as fool proof and counterfeits were not uncommon"
],
"score": [
49,
19,
7,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://prezi.com/n78gtsvcyae1/the-history-of-ticket-stubs/"
],
[],
[
"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264464/"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g88w41
|
What exactly does a graphics rendering program do, and more importantly how?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fomcvdy"
],
"text": [
"For five year olds: Computer generated images are made of little pixel elements. Graphics rendering uses mathematical calculations that decide what color and how much light each picture element contains."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g8cqzx
|
How can certain sites and services block you from taking screenshots or sharing screens?
|
For example Netflix doesn't allow to take screenshots, and in discord if you try to screen share the window is black. I'm sure that other sites do it as well.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fomzpan",
"foo4n4b",
"fonlqqf",
"fon39i1",
"fomuuc8",
"fon114e",
"fonzz1w",
"fonnvbn",
"fon6nhv",
"foo3tnt",
"fonyj1n",
"foolg5h"
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"text": [
"I think other posters may have missed the question in 'How' do they do it, not why, I'm going to try and explain in terms of iPhones (this is my first ELI5 answer!) When you take a screenshot pressing the button tells the app you have open that the user has just hit the screenshot combo of buttons, most apps ignore this but others either record it or even further then throw up something else for the phone to capture. iOS uses something called views (I'm not an expert, only started learning last week!) which presents the information to you on the screen, when you hit the screenshot button something called **.UIApplicationUserDidTakeScreenshot** is passed to the app, the app can then use that notification to temporarily show the user a different (blank) view for the screenshot, before continuing on as normal. & #x200B; There is probably other calls like this on other platforms like Windows, Android etc",
"I can answer this for protected video playback (like Netflix) in the Edge browser on Windows. It's actually part of my day job, I work on the team that makes the video rendering pipeline for the Edge browser. Lots of people are mentioning events that notify the browser so it can hide the content or saying that DRM prevents you from capturing it, but that is not actually what is at play here! The images that make up your video are just travelling down a different \"pipe\" than the one that the screenshotting software is looking at. It might seem odd, but the screenshot isn't actually taken from your screen. The image is captured earlier in the process, before all the different \"pipes\" containing image data have converged. In the Netflix case, the video is sent to the screen via Direct Composition (DCOMP). The way this works is that we define an area of the screen where the video should be shown and we put nothing there, this is why it shows up as black in your screenshot. Then we tell your GPU exactly where this blank area is, and give it the video data so that it can put the video on your screen directly. This process skips sending the images to the OS's compositor (the thing that stitches all the images from the different pipes together), which is where the screenshotting software is getting it's image from. This gives us some other benefits besides preventing easy recording of protected content, like significantly increased battery life.",
"On the Android app Netflix is set with FLAG_SECURE \"The flag treats the content of a window as secure, preventing it from appearing in screenshots or from being viewed on non-secure display\" URL_0",
"When you develop and app whatever tools you decide to use to develop it you're bounded to use the provided features an OS provides. One of the features you get access when you develop an app is \"events\" which occur while an user is using your app. These are \"Oh, user clicked < this button > \", or \"User just < typed this > \". One of those events is \"User just took screenshot\". When that happens you as a coder/developer can decide in your code what to do. You can leave the default behavior which would be taking the screenshot, or decide to do something else. Many apps, especially apps that manage important data such as banking apps (also intellectual property apps such as Netflix) disable screenshots in order to secure the data they use within their apps.",
"“[...] the manufacturer of the device on which you are watching the content is cooperating with the service provider [...]” URL_1 Other source: URL_0",
"What platform are we talking about? I'm pretty sure you can take screenshots of Netflix or discord on a Windows. EDIT: maybe they have some hooks installed for the Screenshot button on the keyboard? I rarely ever use that button, since you can take easy screenshots with Win + Shift + S. I don't think they can stop that.",
"There is a lot of wrong information in this thread... From an Android point of view, each application installed, is installed as it's own user account with it's own permissions. By default Android restricts the permissions of the application user accounts unless the permissions are granted within the application source code. Previous versions of Android did not restrict these permissions. As an application developer, you can specify which permissions you want to allow and/or deny (ie. Screenshots). As a user, you can decompile the Java (change the application back to source code), change the permissions and recompile the application. Note, some applications have a server side check for the application signature (the server managed by the application developers checks to see if the application had been altered). If it doesn't match the server will return errors and the application will not work correctly. There are tools, if you are rooted, that allow you to change these permissions during run time (when the application is running) so you don't have to modify the code. One such tool is called Xposed framework. The application will pass the signature test and run successfully. This is only one reason why rooted Androids are blocked from sensitive applications.",
"To ss something on Snapchat, you can use Google voice and say \"ok Google, take a screenshot\" and you can choose where you save it and the person on Snapchat won't be notified.",
"I've not been on Reddit for a couple hours and this blew up. Thanks for all your answers!",
"As someone who toys with various display outputs, the issue is likey HDCP. To have an HDCP compatible device the screen cannot be shared any way due to encryption. So in the unlikely event that you hook up a non HDCP device to a computer and play Netflix you will see a black screen. I have hooked up devices like TV input capture cards to play a computer through and get this problem.",
"When building apps in Android at least, each screen (Activity) has different options, or flags, that can be set. One of those options is private mode, which the Android system (which manages when screenshots are requested) will check for and block the screenshot if it's been set. So it's a best practice to set that option on screens with sensitive data, like banking apps. But it doesn't just apply to screenshots, it blocks recording as well which is why Netflix won't allow you to just rip movies for sharing. Of course, there are ways around that but it's very little effort for them to block 99.9% of cases.",
"DRM is being baked into things now, with CPUs in Kaby Lake and beyond having hardware that decrypts streams and then hands them off to HDCP compliant displays which result in end to end encryption and display of content with no raw feeds bring available to the OS to enable copying. If you want to watch Netflix and 4K on your PC, you have to use a Kaby Lake or newer CPU and if you want 1080p you have to use Microsoft Edge on older CPS because Microsoft was able to provide extra protection for the content because of their familiarity with the operating system. Instead of your computer being a device you control, which has low level access to what runs through it, systems are being turned into entertainment streaming devices controlled by corporations at the lowest hardware levels for the purpose of protecting intellectual property rights and then they give you, the \"owner\" as much control over your system as they think you need."
],
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3915,
1262,
264,
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64,
46,
9,
5,
3,
3,
3,
3
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[],
[],
[
"https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowManager.LayoutParams"
],
[],
[
"https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/316096/how-to-screenshot-netflix/316097#316097",
"https://www.quora.com/What-technology-does-Netflix-and-other-streaming-services-use-to-prevent-someone-from-screen-capturing-a-movie-or-even-taking-a-screen-shot-I-am-a-Computer-Science-major-and-its-annoying-me-that-I-cant-figure-out-how-it-works"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g8d5cl
|
How do powerline adapters work when the electrical wiring in a house is different for network cabling?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fomtt7b",
"fon6gy0"
],
"text": [
"It's pretty much the same idea, it just doesn't work as well *because* the electrical wiring isn't designed to carry network signals. Is there a specific reason why you think they shouldn't work?",
"Standard gigabit ethernet (standard network cabling) uses 8 thin wires in four twisted pairs to communicate information. This information is stored in the difference between the voltages in each twisted pair. For example: within a pair one wire may be at +2v and the other at -2v, sending a 1 to whoever is currently listening. The cool thing with doing it this way is that it still works if you add a bias to the wires, e.g. if wire one is +102v and wire two is +98v you will get the exact same digital reading. Standard house electrical cable is three relatively thick wires. The size of the wires is determined by the amount of current expected to pass through the wire, so if the cable is trying to run a big motor, then it will have to be larger than would be needed to run a lightbulb. Note that in the vast majority of situations there is no such thing as too big of a wire for a given task. So as far as running digital traffic over power wires, you could make a ethernet cable out of eight different big house wires and it would just work (with the exception of some weirdness caused by radio waves). It would just be far heavier and more expensive than a proper ethernet cable. A similar technology to what you are talking about is Power over Ethernet (POE). This is where we do the opposite, we use Ethernet cable to power something with DC at the exact same time we talk to it. This works by using the fact that we can apply a bias to ethernet wires and still get information through (e.g. the voltage can wiggle between +102v and +98v, but still enough v to power a small device). One drawback of doing this is due to how small the wires are, you can't deliver very much power without causing problems -- that's why this is only used for small electronics. Powerline adapters are slightly more complicated than this due to how they are injecting data onto AC power lines, not DC. In addition you only have 3 wires to play with as opposed to the 8 in an ethernet cable. The wire count problem is resolved by slowing the data rate way down, and only passing one value through the wire in a given moment as opposed to the 4 values you can instantaneously pass with ethernet. The AC/DC problem is solved by using electrical engineering wizardry to ignore the large 60hz wiggles that make up AC and just listen to the far faster (millions of hz) wiggles that make up the data. This can be done similarly to how a radio tuner works, but that is outside of the scope of the question. TLDR: It works, just not as well."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g8glcq
|
is it bad to leave my phone charging all night
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fonc3ua"
],
"text": [
"if the phone is low and disconnect it first thing no. damage to li ion batteries comes from constant charging. the charging circuit has a set limit usually of about 5% meaning, it will stop charging wait for the charge to drop 5% then turn on again. the continual topping off will slowly ruin the battery. the effects of this is most often seen in laptop pc's \"it just doesnt seem to hold a charge anymore\". because they stay plugged into the power adaptor all day and continue this topping off constantly. i usually plug mine in before bed and disconnect it in the morning. my battery is 5 years old and still gets to 96-97% full"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g8jlwq
|
How the hell does memory / storage work? Flash drives, hard drives, floppy drives, etc.
|
I barely understand floppies (somethin with magnets and a strip with magnetically sensitive stuff on it, I think) and after that I'm just lost entirely. I've seen the inside of a mechanical hard drive and have seen the platters and the head. I think I know that the data is on the platters, but have no idea how it gets there, how it's read, or how it's erased. And flash memory just is a whole 'nother universe. How the hell does a [piece of plastic smaller than my thumbnail]( URL_0 ) store 8,000,000,000,000 ones and zeros?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fonx5ye",
"foo9nq4",
"fonuz9y"
],
"text": [
"Magnetic memory: Made up of small crystal-like structures called magnetic domains. With a high enough magnetic field, you can get all elementary magnets (ie,magnetic fields caused by the atoms) to align, and thus hold a bit of information. The smaller you can make the domains (and still be able to read/write them), the higher the density. Flash storage: Each bit is a floating gate transistor. Basically just like a normal microchip transistor, but with an extra gate in-between, that's not connected to anything. If you want to write a bit, you apply a high voltage to the gate, causing electrons to \"tunnel\" into the floating gate, where they get trapped. If you want to read, you apply a low voltage to the gate and see if the transistor \"opens\". If it does, the bit was 0, if it doesn't (because the charge on the floating gate gets in the way) it was 1. And ofc theses transistors can be made really small, in the scale of nanometers, with lithography. That's why TB sizes are possible.",
"Imagine you have a light switch in your kitchen (it doesn't even need to be wired to anything, the switch itself is what's important). Imagine you have a problem where you wake up in the morning and can't remember whether the dishes in the dishwasher have been washed or not. So you devise a code. Before you go to bed, if the dishes are clean, you turn the switch ON. If they're dirty, you leave it OFF. In the morning, when you wake up, you can tell whether the dishes are clean or dirty by looking at the switch. Voila! You've written an **encoded binary message** (on or off as an encoding for clean or dirty) to **persistent storage**. The problem with the storage solution above is that you only have 1 bit (**b**inary dig**it**) of space, and also your encoding scheme isn't very extensible (it can only store one kind of message about one kind of data). With some creativity though, you could easily create more complex encodings, capable of holding more complex messages, and you could add more switches to your wall to get more bits of storage. With 2 switches (bits) you have 4 binary states you can remember (off/off, off/on, on/off, on/on). With N switches (bits), you have 2^N states. Now you can remember all sorts of details about your kitchen! Computer storage does exactly the same. The encodings used are far more versatile than the toy encoding devised above (i.e. `on == clean` and `off == dirty`), and they've been standardized so everybody in the world knows what they mean (thus allowing software and hardware to interoperate on standard platforms). The switches used are **waaaaaay** smaller than a light switch, and they are flipped via mechanically controlled magnets (in a HDD) rather than human fingers. My description above is mostly centered around computer science, which makes modern computing **conceptually and logically** possible. The switches themselves are more in the realm of microelectronics, but they are the tiny heroes that make modern computing **physically** possible (and even I don't know much about exactly how they work, because it's not really relevant to a software engineer). RAM is similar but also quite different, and it's pretty hard to cover it all in a post like this, but the key difference is that it is a tradeoff compared to persistent storage, like so many design elements in engineering are tradeoffs. RAM is far more performant in terms of speed than persistent storage, but it's not... persistent. So in the [von Neumann architecture]( URL_1 ) on which most modern computers are based... both RAM and storage have their own roles to play. If you really want to learn, I suggest checking out Petzold's ***[CODE]( URL_0 )***. It's perfectly accessible to somebody without a CS background and is really enjoyable even as a casual read. I kind of want to read it again now... it's been a long time since my first reading.",
"It's just segmented into pieces with either \"some magnetic charge\" or \"no magnetic charge\". So it's like by the ability to name the segments smaller while still being detectable. We are getting very good at that. A single bit wise memory segment on those media is really, really small. Often, those media have layers of storage, as well. It IS impressive at times."
],
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31,
15,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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"https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Developer-Practices-ebook/dp/B00JDMPOK2",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g8mq74
|
How do adblockers detect ads and tell them apart from the main site?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fooc9jy"
],
"text": [
"Back in Grampa's days, people just took the ad picture and put it on their homepage per hand. Then a little known company known as 'google' came and said 'hey, you don't need to do this, here's a link to our server, you put that on your homepage and it'll chose a fitting ad for you. You don't need to put in in there yourself!' The adblocker knows that server and blocks any connection to it."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g8n3uk
|
why is nuclear waste so bad? Is uranium not radioactive before processing?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foof9wr",
"foofze6",
"fooeta9",
"foowue3"
],
"text": [
"Uranium is radioactive. But the process of using it in a nuclear reaction creates what are called \"fission products\", dozens of different radioactive isotopes that usually have much shorter half-lives than uranium, and as a result give off much more radiation per unit time. A new fuel elements can be safely handled with nothing more than a pair of rubber gloves (and those are mostly to protect the element from skin oils). Spent fuel elements, on the other hand, are \"self protecting\"; anyone who attempts to handle them will die.",
"* uranium has a very long half-life, it decays so slowly it is not particularly dangerous * naturally occurring uranium is typically found in ores that have yields of less than 1% * nuclear power works by forcing uranium to decay more quickly, and many of the things it decays into have short half-lives and are highly radioactive",
"Uranium is really common, but nuclear fuel is enriched uranium and more radioactive. Spent fuel is very hot, highly radioactive, and will be deadly for a long time. Storing it requires thinking about what will happen over a long, long time and no one wants it to get into, say, drinking water in three hundred years and kill people.",
"Uranium is a super weak alpha emitter. It’s only dangerous if you eat it. When you split uranium in a reactor, you end it with all sorts of other stuff that’s not uranium and is extremely radioactive. The part of the fuel that is uranium is still safe. But you have all this other really nasty stuff that was born and mixed in with it."
],
"score": [
20,
16,
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g8sjkk
|
what exactly is anti aliasing? I usually dont mess around with graphic settings in games, but recently I've gotten curious.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fopcchm",
"fopcd1r"
],
"text": [
"your computer’s monitor is made up of a bunch of pixels, which are tiny squares that are each one color. this is great for drawing perfectly horizontal or vertical lines, but of course a diagonal line or a curve doesn’t perfectly fit into square pixels, so in order for these to not come out with jagged edges, we shade the edges, aka antialiasing. [click here for an example of before and after]( URL_0 )",
"It smooths out rough/jagged looking graphics for a more realistic feel, it’s usually toggleable since it can often have an effect on FPS/game performance."
],
"score": [
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://ageeky.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/aaexampleIMG_id1386238400_343178-300x197.jpg"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g8spex
|
How do people match their sensitivities when switching between games?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fopdvdz"
],
"text": [
"In my case, I pretty much use mouse and keyboard only, so I can actually match my sensitivities pretty easily. The first time I open a game, I adjust my sensitivity so that when I move my mouse from one end of my mousepad to the other, my camera does a 360. I find this to be a nice balance for most games."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9266e
|
How does file compression work?
|
Title basically says it all. I understand how photos and videos can trade quality for file size, but files like games or large folders can be shrunk into a .rar or .zip file, transferred, and pulled back out with no loss to functionality. How does that work? If nothing's being taken away how is space being saved?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foqrztn",
"foqzs9s",
"foqsb8u"
],
"text": [
"Some files have patterns in them. The compression tool looks through the file and finds the patterns. Then it makes a new file with one copy of the patterns, followed by the rest of the file including a marker for \"pattern 1 goes here\" or \"pattern 5 goes here\". Since the markers are smaller than the patterns, and some file have a very large number of certain patterns, the compressed format of the file can be much smaller. Some files don't compress well, and the compression doesn't make them any smaller. Above I've discussed lossless compression, where no information is destroyed. There are other approaches used to compress sounds or images, that also lose some less significant information, but those operations are not lossless.",
"I’ll use a text as an example. Take this sentence: I am very awesome Given that every character (letters and spaces) requires 8 bits (1 byte), it takes 136 bits to store the text. 17 characters x 8 bits = 136. To compress, we start by counting how often each character appears. Listing from most often to least we get: * space appears 3 times * E appears 3 times * A = 2 * M = 2 * I = 1 * O = 1 * R = 1 * S = 1 * V = 1 * W = 1 * Y = 1 Now, we convert each character to a string of bits like this: * space = 01 * E = 001 * A = 0001 * M = 00001 * I = 000001 * O = 0000001 * R = 00000001 * S = 000000001 * V = 0000000001 * W = 00000000001 * Y = 000000000001 What this does is make the letters that appear most often use the fewest number of bits. You can see that normally space, E, A, M, I and O take one byte each (8 bits) but when compressed they each take up less than 1 byte. R still takes 1 byte and S, V, W, and Y each use more than one byte, but because they occur less often, you still come out ahead overall. If you now write this using the raw bits, you would get: * I = 000001 * space = 01 * am = 000100001 * space = 01 * very = 000000000100100000001000000000001 * space = 01 * awesome = 000100000000001001000000001000000100001001 Strung all together, it looks like this: 000001010001000010100000000010010000000100000000000101000100000000001001000000001000000100001001 Which is 96 bits. Since there’s 8 bits in a byte, you’ve now compressed the original 17 bytes down to 12 bytes. 12*8=96 bits. You’ll notice that each letter is a string of 0s with a 1 at the end. This means that to decompress, you find the ones and count the zeroes in front of it. 000001 is an I, 01 is a space, 0001 is an A, etc. Now I have to mention that the compressed file has that conversion table added at the very beginning so that you know that 01=space, 001=E and so on. So that means compressing a short sentence like “I am very awesome” would actually make a larger file just because that conversion table would take up so much space. But if you were to compress a whole book, you can see how well that would work. Also, there are standard compression tables based on how often characters appear in a language overall so that you don’t have to include the conversion table. They’re not as efficient, but have the advantage of not needing to do the character counts and calculations, so they’re faster, and you don’t waste space in small files with the conversion table.",
"Compression algorithm will try to find patterns in the data in various ways and then instead of outputting the data they output the pattern to recreate the data. This is how both lossy and lossless compression work. However for lossy compression used for audio, images and video the compression algorithm will find the patterns it thinks is important and then ignore any deviation from that pattern while a lossless compression algorithm will note down any deviation between the data and the patterns it found as it is not known which deviation is important and which is not. Different algorithms is able to find patterns in different types of data so if you use the wrong algorithm or the data have few recognizable patterns at all then it will not compress very good. This is why you can not compress already compressed data as there are no more patterns to find."
],
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53,
16,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g97noi
|
How do products like speakers and headphones create noise and bass?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fortll2"
],
"text": [
"The song is sent to the speaker as an electric frequency. This frequency varies depending on which sound is being played. An electromagnet pushes the membrane out and then pulls it in hard. This vibration travels through the air, because paricles bump into eachother and small hairs in your ears feel the vibrations and send them to your brain."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g99are
|
How is time programmed into a computer?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fos1dej",
"fos1ffe"
],
"text": [
"computers have clocks in them. Typically they contain quartz crystals - quartz is \"piezoelectric\" which means that if you send an electric charge through it, it pulses with a regular interval. The timer chip counts those pulses and turns them into \"ticks\" which are very small fractions of a second. The computer can count ticks to know when a second (or whatever) has passed. Usually the clock has a backup battery for when the computer is turned off. Most modern computers can also get the current time via the internet, so they know what time it is when they start, and then can use their internal clock to measure time going forward.",
"There is a piece of hardware in your computer, generally on the motherboard, that contains a very small quartz crystal that vibrates at a set frequency. It is always receiving power through a battery, yes that battery you see on the motherboard. A counter keeps track of the number of times the crystal vibrates (which is constant) and when you boot up your computer it calculates how much time has passed. If the battery dies and the computer looses track of time, you will get that prompt asking you to enter the date and time."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9a57j
|
How do game roms keep track of time?
|
In game cartridges of games that need to know the time (e.g. 2nd gen Pokémon) is a clock. You set the time initially and as long as the battery still works you can start it years later and the time in the game is still correct. How does this work with roms? They can’t have a clock. Does the emulator inject the system time somehow?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fos5f6a"
],
"text": [
"You got it already. The emulator can inject the system time. The emulator already receives all sorts of external input from your button presses. System time is just another input that can be mapped to the console memory that is simulated in your PC memory."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g9bqcb
|
Why in super slo-mo videos (i.e. sports replays) does it look like the lighting is rapidly flashing?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fosf72j"
],
"text": [
"Because sometimes they actually are flashing, some lights flicker in a frequency that to us looks like a steady light but in reality they could be turning on and off many times per second."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9byfb
|
What is Memory Bandwidth?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fosi9nn",
"fosi6bo"
],
"text": [
"Memory bandwidth is how much bulk data can go into or out of memory. It's sometimes a bottleneck of system performance, especially for graphics cards.",
"Memory bandwidth is the rate at which data can be read from or stored into memory by a processor. Memory bandwidth is usually expressed in units of bytes per second. Memory bandwidth that is advertised for a given system is usually the maximum theoretical bandwidth. Usually the observed memory bandwidth will be less than the advertised bandwidth."
],
"score": [
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9du5t
|
If humans can detect changes at 60 frames per second on a screen and lightbulbs turn off and on 60 times a second because they receive AC power at 60Hz, how come we don't notice light bulbs blinking?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fostdjz",
"fosvoa8",
"fot5qct",
"fosy88l",
"fothh7c",
"fosvuon"
],
"text": [
"see it like this:in 60 fps: frames changes 'one after another'. in case of a glowing bulb: it is the heating element that provides us the URL_0 when we turn it off,it do not turns off immediately,but falls descendingly until it no more glows within few seconds. So if you turn it on and off 60 times,then it do not gets the 'gap time' in between to turn off. Therefore it remains almost same,completely different in case of 60fps, where every frame changes every 60th part of a sec.",
"A few reasons! The light bulb (incandescent) doesn’t blink on and off, it dims down and up really quickly (sine vs. square wave) so it’s not like it’s off in equal parts that it’s on. Newer energy efficient bulbs don’t blink or dim at all- the power is converted to DC current. Second, the light doesn’t change the way a video does. You don’t notice your computer monitor blinking when looking as a picture right? Your monitor is blinking at least 60 times per second, but if the frame doesn’t change, then it appears as a still.",
"Some good comments here but with respect to the frequency, a normal incandescent light bulb “flickers” at 120 HZ. The reason is that AC voltage is an”up and down” sine wave. One “up and down” cycle gives you two bright pulses of light, at the top and at the bottom of the AC sine wave. I used to have a free app on my phone that used the flashlight like a strobe light. You can use the app to set the frequency and then test yourself to see where you stop seeing the flicker and it looks like it is steady on.",
"They don't so much blink as \"flicker\". Here is an incandescent light bulb with a slow motion camera. URL_0 LED bulbs get their power rectified to DC voltage before being used, so they don't flicker.",
"I know of 3 things that helps prevent seeing blinking. Might be more? 1. A full cycle with AC power crosses 0 volts twice, so it's 120Hz. That goes past the detection range for some people, but many people can still detect 120Hz. 2. A heated incandescent element emits light, basically blackbody radiation similar to a fire. It's the heat that produces the light. It still has a lot of heat when the power crosses 0v, so it only dims a little bit during the crossings. It doesn't actually blink, but lowers slightly in intensity. You can see this when you turn off a bulb, and it takes a second or two to go dark. 3. Your eyes have persistence, which means the light will appear to still be lit a very short amount of time. This is the principle for dimming LED lights (which actually do go dark because they emit light differently) by pulsing them on/off quickly. But despite the pulsing, some people (like me) can still see the blinking (and it drives us crazy).",
"Your question seems to be describing the same thing. On a screen at 60fps you don't notice any interruptions - it looks like the motion is continuous. When a light blinks at 60fps you don't notice it blinking - the light looks constant."
],
"score": [
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6,
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3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
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|
g9dyye
|
How overclocking a processor can cause instability or crashes
|
If everything in a processor is designed to be synchronous and rely on the clock signal for timing, then why is it that overclocking the processor so often causes it to become unstable or crash?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fosuayi",
"fosuujr",
"fosuhf8"
],
"text": [
"Imagine you're in charge of a school cafeteria. You've got all the people trained to provide food for students in line. At each station (meat, starch, vegetables, dessert, drink), each student can be served in exactly 60 seconds. You're so happy with this, you even have a clock: every 60 seconds, it rings bell, and the students move to the next station. The meat-servers can put a dollop of meat with gravy in sixty seconds; the starch server will add either potatoes or bread in sixty seconds, and so on. But you get complaints: the lines are too long. So one day, you9 make the clock go faster, and ring the bell every 55 seconds. And it works! It turns out that at each station, the servers actually had plenty of time to do each task. So you make the clock go even faster, and drop it to 50 seconds. And then you notice that when students get served bread, about one in fifty doesn't get their bread. The server explains that each loaf only has 25 slices, and they have 2 loafs; that means that every 50 students, they have an extra step. Under the old system, there was just enough time to get the two loaves of bread in time. But in the new system, there isn't enough time. When the bell rings, and the student moves on, they haven't gotten their bread yet. Your computer is like that. It's designed to handle a range of clock speeds. When you go faster, you first use up the \"extra\" range that the designers put in. And then the clock is running too fast for every possible situation, and it just .. fails. An addition gets the wrong answer, or storing data doesn't store it, or a compare does the wrong compare. The more you overclock, the more mistakes get made. Some are innocuous (most students are getting their bread), but others are not.",
"See [this video from *Aliens*]( URL_0 ) to understand what happens when you try to go too fast with any physical process. (Watch it all the way to 1:50.) At some speed the mechanism can't keep up and errors happen which, for computers, means instability. Just because the processor is synchronous doesn't mean that each individual component doesn't have limits. Manufacturing is imperfect so each component will have different limits.",
"Just because a specific timing has been agreed upon doesn't mean everybody is able to fulfill the speed requirements. You telling your 4ghz cpu to run at 5ghz is like telling a postman that he should deliver 25 packages in 2 minutes He might be able to do it at first, maybe even for a while, but eventually there'll be an error or just a package that's not being delivered RIP"
],
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"https://youtu.be/HUvLn-oo0vA?t=0m40s"
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g9ht6f
|
Why do games like COD take up ~200 GB of space?
|
There are other games that have more or just as much content and have better graphics so why does COD take so much space?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"foti9pq",
"fothwyy",
"fotmfdb"
],
"text": [
"Textures and Audio make up a good bulk of data. Especially with the sound design of MW there's a lot stuffed in. You can say it's lazy, but that's only to a point. You don't want to compress the game to hell, but I'm sure it's reduced somewhat somehow.",
"Alot depends on how they package the files. Cod being new maps as separate files being release fairly frequently will take more space. When titanfall originally came out, it was 50gb. This was almost unheard of at the time for a multiplayer only game with only a few maps, it was just how they handled their textures",
"Let's first take a look on what is a game made of? A game usually has two parts the first is programmed part made by programming languages and the other is the graphics part. Most-or nearly all- modern games use something in the part of programming called game engine, A game engine is a set of useful and frequently used tools and functions ready for use instead of wasting the programmers time on repeating the same tasks and reinventing the wheel. The game engine with all the programming is relatively small in your case here, what really takes a lot of space is graphics and audio part, Let's see why is that. A normal picture in it's raw format on computer is a set of pixels, That means the picture is a matrix every pixel in it is a color that means if we have three values expressing the color in every pixel and every value is 16bit which is two bytes (16 bit colors are very old and were used on old versions of windows) and the screen is 720×480 we will need for a raw picture a capacity of: 720\\*480\\*2 = 691200 bytes = almost 690Kbyte for one low quality small picture. if the game is 2d It will only have pics and won't have 3d models, imagine a game with hundreds or thousands of these pictures!! when it comes to 3d things are getting more complex because you have 3d models which are matrices of x,y,z points in the space describing the object, this makes the shape of the object but doesn't make its colors so a we use a picture and make it fit in a specific way to this model and this picture is called a texture. Now let's imagine a game like GTA this game has the models of full cities and the texture are in high quality How much would it use?? a lot. So they don't use anything in its raw format , all of those things are compressed."
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3
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|
[
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[
"url"
] |
g9isk8
|
when you take a photo of a screen and the camera tries to focus on the pixels, you get that weird wavy pattern. Why does this change when you zoom in and out on the photo?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fotnw90"
],
"text": [
"It's called a Moire pattern. It happens because the spacing of pixels on the image of the subject screen almost, but not quite, matches with the spacing of the pixels in the sensor. At one point they line up, a bit to the side they miss and a bit further on they line up again. It changes with zooming as the image pixel spacing changes with the zoom amount, the same number of pixels cover a larger or smaller area of the sensor."
],
"score": [
10
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9kbru
|
how can we take pictures of planets that are millions and millions of light years away from Earth?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fotvfvi",
"fotxltl"
],
"text": [
"The best pictures we have (and only of a few) are tiny spots. There are collections of \"images\" of exoplanets; those are just fantasy. Exoplanets are detected by observing changes to their respective suns.",
"We can't. Our entire galaxy, the milky way, is only about 100,000 light years in diameter. The most distant planets we have so far discovered are less than 10,000 light years away. Exoplanets (IE planets that orbit other stars) are usually discovered by how they affect the light of their suns. We do not have actual images of most of them. We have actual images of only a few of the known exoplanets. Those are only a few 100 light years distant. The images only show blobs, at best. [Here are some pictures of Beta Pictoris b which is about 65 light years away.]( URL_0 ) Many other images are much worse. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) uses something called the VLT to take these pictures. VLT stands for Very Large Telescope. And that's basically the answer. For context: The sun is about 8 light minutes away and the furthest solar planets a few light hours."
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/"
]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9m7ue
|
How are cannons ever effective in infantry warfare if they only shot steel/stone balls and can possibly only hit a few men.its a very unfair effort to effect ratio.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fou6m13",
"fou6255",
"fou7qyi"
],
"text": [
"The time period where \"old style\" cannons fired at infantry coincided with the period where infantry moved in densely packed musket squares. Add to that the fact that solid cannonballs *bounce* when they hit the ground at a flat angle. Basically you could mow down an entire column of soldiers with a lucky cannonball and possibly disorient/injure others nearby. Side note: old style cannons could also be used to fire a mass of smaller projectiles, [like a shotgun. ]( URL_0 )",
"Watching guys next to you get horribly maimed by cannonballs when you have no chance to do anything but stand there and hope you aren't next is very demoralizing. Cannons can also be loaded with grapeshot (several fist-sized balls), canister (hundreds of bullets), or basically any old scrap. Range and accuracy go down, but potential to kill or injure soft targets goes way up. Later-period cannons also routinely used exploding shells.",
"If the cannons only shoot a single big solid round for each shot then it can still be very effective against ranks of men. Especially from a flanking position. If the cannon ball hits the ground at a flat angle it does not dig in but rather skipps off the ground and continues forward. So a single cannon ball would be able to go for hundreds of meters at lower then head height killing or maiming anyone who stand in its way. And if the cannons are placed on a flank so they can shoot down the line of attacking infantry or cavelery they can take out maybe a hundred men in a single shot. Another use of solid shot was against fortified targets. If your opponent had been able to set up wooden or stone fortifications or if there were natural fortifications that they take advantag of then a solid shot from a cannon would make it shatter spraying lots of deadly splinters out the back of the fortifications where the men are hiding. The cannonball does not even have to penetrate to cause huge number of casualties to the men hinding behind. However these were very situational conditions. So even though the cannon crew might have some solid shots on hand it was just a tiny part of their ammunition pack. A popular thing was to load the cannon with musket balls. You would be able to fit more musket balls in a cannon barrel then in a musket barrel which allowed you to hit an entire section of infantry with a rain of lethal bullets in one single shot. There was also a wide veriaty of granades that could be fired from cannons. These would either explode on the ground killing any soldiers and animals it landed near or they would cut the fuses short so it exploded in the air raining down a shower of shrapnell from the granade."
],
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40,
19,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapeshot"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g9tz8z
|
How do modern cameras know what the color of an object is?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fovlgz5"
],
"text": [
"If you have normal human vision, you have trichromatic vision. Your eyes see color using three types of cone cells: one most sensitive to red light, another to green, and another to blue. Different wavelengths (colors) of visible light are distinguished by their relative impact on these three types of cells. When you see something emitting yellow light, it activates your red and green cones in roughly equal measure. When we make computer monitors, we can trick your eyes into seeing yellow by shining red and green light in roughly equal measure. Modern cameras have sensors that are fundamentally only sensitive to the overall intensity of the light, so we put little red, green, and blue filters over the light sensors which are used to build each pixel (picture element) of the image. If we only wanted black and white (monochromatic) images, we could get much more detailed pictures with the same sized sensor because we wouldn't need three light sensors for each pixel. Spacecraft with cameras tend to have monochromatic image sensors and the ability to put different filters in front of the whole sensor, so three pictures would be needed to be assembled into something approximating human color vision."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbbaai
|
- Why are micro SD cards that weird shape and not a normal rectangle?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp4shi9"
],
"text": [
"A normal rectangle can be put in backwards or upside down. That's bad for fragile and conductive connectors."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbeqel
|
what is end to end encryption and the whole bill surrounding it?
|
If anyone could help me learn this in the most basic way possible, it'll be really helpful for one of my uni classes. Thanks
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp5cfs3",
"fp5ckhn",
"fp5gzwt"
],
"text": [
"So, in \"traditional\" encryption, whatever service you use to send a message to someone has the ability to decrypt and read your message. Or, the messages are stored \"at rest\" in *unencrypted* form. In *end-to-end* encryption, however, nobody but you and the person you send the message to has the ability to decrypt and read it -- not *even* the service. They store it encrypted and just send it along. The American government doesn't like that -- they don't want people to have the ability to send messages that they can't read if they want to, so they're trying to force services to put *backdoors* in: that is, a method by which the government can decrypt the messages. The problem with this is that a backdoor is, obviously, a weakness in the encryption, and if the backdoor exists, it *will* be found. There's also a very strong argument against government intrusion.",
"Encryption is encoding a message or data in such a way that you have to have a “key” or code to read it. End to end encryption is when the message is encoded so that ONLY the person receiving it has the key. No other person, not the govt, nor the service provider, can read that message. The EARNIT bill (obviously named to be palatable to conservatives) would make it illegal to have such a system based in the USA. Service providers would be forced to provide a backdoor to the government to access communications. While this has obvious upsides, such as stemming the flow of illegal drugs/sex trafficking/illegal pornography etc, it also means that there is no expectation of privacy whatsoever if it passes.",
"Imagine you want to send a confidential letter to somebody. You hire a courier who says they will 'encrypt' the message for you. They arrive, take your envelope, and you watch them lock it up inside a safe in their van. But... they are holding the key. You watch them drive off into the distance, and you are confident that your letter is secure in the safe, and nobody breaking into the van can read it. But the courier company can. When the courier shows up at your intended destination, and unlocks the safe to retrieve the message, the receiver can't be sure that it hasn't actually been unlocked before. Hell, the letter probably got stored unlocked in a big depot somewhere. End-to-end encryption in this example would be locking the letter into a safe that only you (and your recipient) have a key to - the courier does not. You hand the courier the entire safe, you keep the key and the courier takes your safe where it needs to go. Because of the nature of this method, you have to have organised in some way for the other end to have the key to the safe, but the important thing is that you know up front that the courier company, and nobody else in-between has that key. You have ensured it is 'encrypted' the entire way, from end, to end. I am not from the US so am less knowledgeable about the bill, other than to say that having secure transmission of information like this means that nobody in the middle can read it, which ostensibly makes it harder for authorities to verify what is going on is lawful and safe. A government may want to legislate against this to try to ensure it can read what happens, perhaps by outright banning it, or to try to force 'backdoors' in such systems whereby the keys people use are easily discovered, or are not very unique, or the lock mechanism sucks, or whatever, so that they can still break into the safe if they want/need to. This is a highly controversial thing for a government to want to do, both for invading privacy and because forcing the keys/safe to be weak all but guarantees the government would not be the only people finding their way into these 'secure' backdoored safes. Many existing companies and systems rely on end to end encryption already to work properly and safely, and keep your data safe."
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gbjz0k
|
Why is it considered "unsafe" to hold down the power button to shut off a computer?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"On almost any device with processor and RAM (pretty much anything these days), holding the power key for 10+ seconds will force a hard power cycle - like physically turning it off and on again. Problem is, when computers (or phones, or tablets) are running, there are files open. Some may be being written to. Some may be critical system files. In general, interrupting file writes is a bad thing - at best you're just missing the data that may not have been saved yet, at worst the file system entries that describe the file and where on the storage device it resides get messed up and the file is badly corrupted or badly mangled. Shutting down or rebooting the device properly with a tap/command and \"yes\" after the prompt will give the operating system of the device time to properly save and close all files. In reality however, most modern operating systems are designed to be relatively fault tolerant of this. I haven't had a corrupt system file issue from a hard reset in close to 10 years not since moving to Windows 7. And I've never noticed such a problem on a smart phone or tablet.",
"I wouldn't call it \"unsafe\". 99% of the time, holding down the power button to shut off a PC will not result in any ill effects. Sometimes, when the computer is frozen, it's the best way to shut the computer off, and is probably safer than just pulling the plug. The reason it's not a good idea to do it if you don't have to, is that it interrupts whatever the computer's doing and tells it to JUST STOP. This can be a problem if the computer happened to be re-writing an important system file at the time, because this could leave the file half-written, and in rare cases the computer might not be able to figure out how to fix the file when you start it back up. It's a good idea to take a look at the hard drive activity light (the light that flashes or flickers to indicate the computer is \"thinking\") and only shut off the computer if the light is blinking rarely or not at all.",
"Imagine you are working on something important in the library, and the library says they are about to close, you finish what you are doing, pick up your stuff and leave. This is essentially what ~~shitting~~ *shutting* down a computer does If you hold the power button it’s essentially the equivalent of being kicked out of the library with no advice and having everything you were working on thrown out. Some work will be lost",
"Most hardware can take it and nothing will happen, except for a few electromechanical devices that won’t have enough time to park some moveable parts, like hard disks (still pretty safe most of the time too). The problem is software. In modern computers the primary memory (the only memory the processors have direct access to) are RAMs, or random access memory, a type of memory that is volatile, that’s is, without power, all memory is lost. Only secondary memories, like HDs, SSDs, flash drivers, etc. aren’t volatile. The reason is simple: RAM is up to 20 thousand times faster than secondary storage. That’s why it’s primary. This also means that for efficiency purposes and so that users don’t keep waiting for disk writes (they once waited for slow floppy disks to complete !), when writing files, they stay on hold in RAM, while in background they’re being written to non volatile storage. This happens very frequently, so that it will be very common for files to be partially written. If you switch power off after writing a document, you might lose the file you thought you’ve saved. If you switch power off during a system update, then we might be talking about an incomplete program necessary to boot or even mixed old and new programs, possibly incompatible with each other, in the system. There are many ways to reduce the damage, though, the most famous is the use of “journaling file systems”, which are able to write files and the file system structures in two steps, with the help of a journal stored in disk. In case of a system failure the journal can be used as an efficient redundant indicator that the file was or was not fully written. It guarantees that there will be no garbage in the file, but can only protect it in chunks: either all data was written or all data in the chunk was lost. So it’s not a silver bullet. That’s why most systems have an unmount or eject command for pen drives and they complain if the pen drive is removed “unsafely”. Also, most operating systems will try to write to pen drives synchronously, immediately copying contents from RAM to the disk and even blocking further operations on it until all data is written.",
"There are (basically) two types of memory, RAM and your hard drive. RAM is really fast, but when it loses power it forgets everything. The hard drive is really slow, but holds information even when the power is turned off. When your computer is working, it holds most of what it's doing in RAM, because it's a lot faster. Every now and then, it writes stuff to the hard drive to store for later. You can force this to happen by saving a document or installing a program, but dozens of programs (and your operating system) are doing this behind the scenes without telling you. Now imagine there was some file with some information, like the current president. In the hard drive, the file says \"Barack Obama\". Something opens that file (pulling it into RAM), changes the contents to say \"Donald Trump\". You save the file to the hard drive, and the system starts writing one letter at a time. \"Darack Obama\" - > \"Dorack Obama\" - > \"Donack Obama\" and so on. If you turned the computer off while it was writing the letters in, it would just stop where ever it happened to be, maybe thinking the current president was \"Donald Obama\". Depending on what program opened that file later, it may not understand who \"Donald Obama\" is, and crash the program. But some other program might recognize \"Donald Obama\", and pull up the fanfic I'm writing.",
"Super boiled down, The computer needs a moment to save certain files and “collect itself”, and control how the hard drive spins down and make sure it isnt writing data. Say the computer is changing something in a necessary save file for the Operating System while you turn it off via the button. If it didnt save the file correctly, you might have a corrupt file that will keep the computer from working correctly, or just the file disappears. Not so bad if its a book report, really not great if its a file your computer needs to be able to operate. Back in the day the computer wouldnt know what was wrong, eventually you had the option to compaewre the code to a backup and it would swap rhe needed files to where they were lost. Nowadays its almost all built in, windows hides a copy of the OS from you so it can check to make sure the OS thats running matches what it should be. Im sure ive over generalized, so anybody else feel free to correct",
"Imaginate you are riding a bycicle Turning a computer off normally is like, you stopping the bicycle and you walking away safely Turning off a computer suddenly with the power button is like while you riding the bicycle, somehow and suddenly the bicycle stops and you fall and suffer some damage Well, the person in the bicycle are your files and the OS files (you can suffer little damage and lose a document with bad luck, but with really really bad luck an important system file could get corrupt and that means your operative sistem to be inoperable, or inestable or slow or with sudden errors or a program just stop working anymore) Technology has improved a lot and turning off a pc suddenly have a lot less chances to screw something but it is still not recommended",
"You can put someone to sleep by making them a nice bed, giving them a warm glass of milk and playing a lullaby. Or you can put someone to sleep by choking them until they pass out.",
"It’s not really anymore. The issues associated with that were address many years ago. It’s just an old idea that people don’t realize is outdated. Just like warming up your car in the winter. Since fuel injectors came about, it actually does not help to let your car sit and idle to warm up. The best way to get it to a safe and healthy operating temp is to drive it. But still, people think they need to warm the car up.",
"Imagine you're working at your desk. Someone says \"hey, it's about time to finish up, we're stopping now, finish up your stuff.\" You'd go ahead and finish the task you were on, or at least get it to a stopping point, and close whatever files needed to be closed, make notes to pick up on things tomorrow, tidy your desk, etc. You're going to be able to pick up pretty well the next day, right? Now, imagine someone instead of doing that just come and yanks you out of your office with everything in process, and then keeps you from returning for two weeks, so that by the time you get back you've forgotten what you were doing, and have to try to reconstruct it from the state of your desk in mid process. Oh, and in that time the cleaners have come by and thrown away everything on your desk. Good chance you're going to lose some stuff, right? Same thing.",
"The force turn off is basically interrupting the machine in anything it is doing. The thing that does get screwed up is the stuff that was in the middle of getting saved to the hard drive, it doesn’t finish so it can’t recall everything later. It’s sort of like when u have have a thought get interrupted and forgot what u wanted to say or do next. With this said most modern applications and OS will try and mitigate the issue. The best example I can think of is Microsoft word still having your document being recoverable if somehow your application was force off with out u saving your work.",
"Because you don't know what's happening as you do that. You're basically pulling the power cord to everything happening. If there was data on the computer that was only in RAM, that data is gone if it hasn't been written out to disk yet. If your computer was writing out to a file and didn't finish and put the \"end of file\" note at the end of the file or the file has a type of encryption or compression that only works when you have all the data together, it could end up corrupted so you cannot open it again. Maybe you might not have been saving something, but the OS might be updating some files or a background process could be syncing and you could end up with a lost file. If you have an older spinning hard drive, it's could be even worse as the arm is moved and held by magnets and removing the power at a bad time could basically cause it to crash and lose a lot of data. (this has been mitigated a bit but was a bigger problem a couple decades ago) The odds of something bad happening if you do it once isn't huge, but if you do it all the time, or worse millions of people across the world just do it normally, then some people are going to have pretty bad times and complain how this company (OS manufacturer, hardware manufacturer, or maker of a program) destroyed their valuable data. Basically they're trying to reduce the odds of bad things happening and if they do, you can't say they didn't warn you.",
"Because when the OS shuts down it does so in a very particular way. It makes sure you aren't writing to any non-volitile (permanent) storage before fully powering down. If you force a shutdown there is a chance you might shut down when you are writing to an important file like your registry.",
"A lot of the explanations in the thread are still pretty technical for a 5yo, so I'm going to try something simpler. Do you know when you have a birthday, your mom (or dad) will do a lot of planning and organization and things to make sure your birthday party goes well and is fun and things happen \"right\"? They'll draw up a list of things that need to happen, things to get from the store, they'll know which stores have birthday decorations, they'll know which of your friends to invite, what gifts you want and so on. They'll then spend a lot of time and effort making sure that all of these things happen and happen on time and in the order they should. They won't get get the cake a week before your birthday and wait for it to get stale in the refrigerator for example. They will go to the store and get the gifts you want so that they're sure they won't be out of stock a day before your actual birthday, etc. (Detailed, more technical note towards the end). Now imagine, your parent started doing all of this a week or two before your birthday, but had to leave suddenly mid-way (hard power off) and was replaced by your cousin Vinny who had no idea what's going on, but was asked to fill in (powering your machine back on). He has no idea what things are already done, which things need doing and which things need following up. At best, he's going to get lucky and be able to start all over and somehow manage to make the birthday happen properly and on time without too many compromises. Worst case, there's a bunch of half-strewn decorations in your bedroom that your mom was putting up but left midway, only half the invites to your friends got sent, they got the wrong address and that gift you thought she'd bought for you was actually never picked up from the store for 2 days and so the store decided to put it back up for sale. How do you think your birthday is going to go? That's kind of what happens when you hard power cycle a computer, your mom disappears and cousin Vinny has to step in. --- Technical Explanation: (The OS along with the CPU does a lot of resource management, has a lot of information on how to do it encoded in it and will carefully orchestrate a lot of the things that need to happen while coordinating with processes running on your machine to make sure they follow protocols, get what they need on time, give it back when they're done with it and clean up after processes that died and weren't able to give back the things they should've. A lot of work \"in-flight\", such as computation, rendering, accounting, cron-jobs, periodic health checks is lost. Files and filesystem corruption are one of those things as a lot of people have mentioned and probably the one most people will run into problems with often. However it's just one of the things, processes might be corrupt their own data however because they'll lose state in the middle of doing something they thought they had time to finish - a classic example is a screwed up software or OS upgrade, but also disk defragmentation, audio/movie rendering, bitcoin mining, genome sequencing, pretty much any long running batch process that does not check point correctly and often. Sometimes network configuration such as IP management will get screwed up, the network will think you still own an IP, you might still have a DHCP lease for it, but your reboot made you \"forget\" your lease or the virtual MAC Address you used to ask for it, so you're asking the DHCP server for a new one lease with a new MAC address, but you're still getting traffic on the old IP address and it's getting dropped either by the network switch or by your network card/OS network stack. Sometimes physical hardware attached to your computer will get into a funky state that requires an expert with special knowledge to come fix it - often custom hardware with less than stellar firmware. An example might be any piece of hardware that has ioctl style interfaces to set/unset bits on the external hardware that get stuck and are not reset by that device itself, or a buffer might have data in it that's not cleared up, but your OS doesn't have the data preceding it anymore to know what to do with it)."
],
"score": [
10863,
907,
227,
101,
54,
19,
15,
14,
7,
5,
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4,
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3
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[],
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[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbljdb
|
How do applications implement the "Undo" feature while being fast? Wouldn't it take a significant amount of memory to be able to remember the last 50+ states of the application?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp6fesi"
],
"text": [
"You don't have to remember the previous state of the application. You only have to remember the particular action that was taken so you can know what to reverse. This takes up very little memory by comparison."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gboib4
|
how can sata drives contain tbs of data, but a CD can only hold a little less than 5 gb?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp6zi3f"
],
"text": [
"The CD is limited by the width of the data path, and it's not 5gb. A DVD can hold 5gb, while a CD can only hold less than 1gb. A CD or DVD uses little tiny pits in the surface to store data. The laser reader reads those little bumps and holes as bits of data, either a one or a zero. That laser has a width, as does the pit in the surface of the CD. The manufacturing process for SSD drives has gotten so precise that they can cram an enormous amount of transistors into a very small area, which allows a very high data density. Hard disk technology, if that's what you're talking about, has advanced as well, to the point that the platter of a hard disk can hold terabytes of data."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbozkt
|
How is it that some websites are able to hijack your back button so that you can't just back out of them?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp72j1x",
"fp7298n",
"fp78lqw",
"fp738rn",
"fp77xqn"
],
"text": [
"There's JavaScript that allows you to add \"fake history\" to the back button. This is because there are sites like GMail where it doesn't do full page requests but only reloads partial contents. With the old style Back buttons you would go into GMail, click an email, click Back, and then end up backing out of GMail entirely. With JavaScript functions for faking the history, they can take over the back button and have it do other partial reloads with new data to make the back button work like you think it should. Unfortunately, there isn't really a way of saying that it's only to be used for Good and not Evil.",
"The back button goes to the last visited URL. If you are sent to one URL which automatically bounces you to the final website, then the process looks like this: Website 1; you click the link; website 2; instant redirect; website 3 Now when you are on website 3 and you hit the back arrow, your computer goes back to website 2, which instantly redirects you to website 3 Website 3; you click the back arrow; website 2; instant redirect; website 3",
"I don't know if this is something \"everybody\" knows, but for anyone who doesn't, all you have to do is long-press the back button. Most browsers will give you a short list of your real history. Then you just click on the previous site of your choice. At least, that's how I deal with this fuckery.",
"There are two ways: the dumb way is to have a ton of of redirects so you click on a link and it goes Link a → link b → link c → website So if you go back, link c will bring you back to the website, and even if you click it twice you’ll only go to link a or b and those will still redirect you back The smarter way is to have some code that pushes fake stuff on your history so if yo go back, you aren’t really going anywhere because the links are all for the same website",
"Haven't seen this in a while but your back button simply returns to a previous URL. The return URL is kept in your browser, on the client side. However, what can be done is when browsing to a site that has this 'hijacking' functionality, my best guess is the following happens: * click on 'hijacking website url' * the server/website sees someone accessing this URL, * server says, ok, but this is where the actual page is (redirect) * then you land on the 'hijacked page' (according to what you see) * you don't like what you see, you click the back button * browser goes to previous url and tries to load the page (of the previous url) * this goes to the server/website and repeats the redirect (from the 3rd bullet point) I am sure there are many ways to do this, but this is one of them Hope this makes sense."
],
"score": [
17,
10,
8,
3,
3
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"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbq0rv
|
Why are batteries almost always facing the opposite direction in items requiring two batteries (ie one batter facing north and the other south)??
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp7ajil",
"fp78wug",
"fp78p9h"
],
"text": [
"TLDR: it's easier to make the battery holders that way Batteries in a device are most often connected in series, with the negative end of one connected to the positive of the other. This is done to increase the voltage to the point necessary to power the device. The reason batteries are insert in opposite directions to each other is that one side of the battery compartment just need to have a metal strip to bridge the two batteries together in series. It's purely a case of ease of design and reduce parts.",
"Bateries are conect the negative part to the positive of the next one. So if you put them facing oposite sides you have the shortest circuit to conect them.",
"Because they are usually connected in series: the negative end of one is connected to the device while its positive end is connected to the negative of the other battery. Then the positive end of the second battery is connected to the device. The cheapest way to do that is to have them lie in opposite directions and connect them at one end with a tiny strip of metal."
],
"score": [
11,
6,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbqavy
|
How is military technology developed?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp7attj"
],
"text": [
"This is an answer that could take up an entire shelf of books. Some research is done by the military, but a lot is also done by private contractors. Some is done by people independent of the military with hopes that they'll be able to sell their inventions to the military. Other times, the military goes out and hires people to do research, or even have competitions. DARPA, for example, offers a prize for teams to build the best vehicle that can drive and navigate itself over heavy terrain. College and other engineering teams compete for that prize. Getting tech into the field is also a very complex field. Sometimes it's very simple and fast; the military has certain centers that are designed for quickly engineering solutions to field problems and producing the products as quickly as possible. Other times, it can takes years or even decades for technology to be fully developed and deployed."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gbsazt
|
How do computers partitions work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp7nocz"
],
"text": [
"Say you have an unsliced loaf of bread that is a single partition hard drive. You can cut the loaf into a whole bunch of slices and each one of those slices is a partition. It's all the same loaf of bread just different slices that you can use for different things."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gby1ya
|
How do we have a picture of our own galaxy?
|
I was reading an article on FRBs and they had a stock image of our galaxy. But how? Unless you've stepped outside of it, turned around, and took a pic (which we clearly haven't since we've only recently left our solar system) how did we get it?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp89tz2",
"fp88zcz"
],
"text": [
"We do not have an image of our galaxy. That is except for images from inside it ie images of the sky from earth. Images in the book are artist interpretation or images of the galaxies we thing look like the milky way What we do have is observations of star distribution around us and we can from it draw conclusions of what type of galaxy we are in. The consensus that the universe is made of galaxies is less then 100 years old. There was a [Great\\_Debate\\_(astronomy)]( URL_0 ) 26 April 1920 so 100 years and 6 days ago. The first observation indicated an ordinary spiral galaxy but it has been suspected in the 1960s and confirmed in 2005 that it is a barred spiral galaxy. So you have seen a change in illustration since then & #x200B; We can measure distances to starts and see how common they are in different directions and distance so we have an idea of how the spiral arms are. Here is an [artist's interpretation]( URL_1 ) of observation overlayed. It is a clear concentration in where stars are and where they are not found, this gives us a good idea of the arms.",
"Artist/Computer generated, you could generate this as we know the positions of the stars in the galaxy. And as you said, you would have to leave the galaxy to do so, and we haven’t been much further than our own solar system. The photos could also be other galaxies, that we believe to look similar to ours. Who knows, maybe one day we will actually have the technology to do so; but it will be many eons from now."
],
"score": [
13,
3
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_(astronomy)",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA19341-MilkyWayGalaxy-SpiralArmsData-WISE-20150603.jpg"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gbyxrb
|
how does a USB hub turn one USB input on your computer into 5 USB inputs? How many USB devices could you potentially have all connected to a single port?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp8bpm9"
],
"text": [
"When USB was thought out they decided to add this feature into the standard because of course it would be useful. Every packet is signed in a way that the hub knows which device it goes to, like the mailman delivering letters to a neighborhood. The maximum number of devices that can be connected is 127, because it is the biggest number in a 7-bit range, just like how 999 is the biggest number in a 3-digit range in our normal number system."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gc03it
|
How do phones know when to rotate the screen?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp8iz1t",
"fp8i9dk"
],
"text": [
"Electronics use a thing called an Accelerometer to measure acceleration in 1-3 axis. With an Accelerometer you can measure gravity's pull on the phone and therefore tell how a phone is oriented. It's usually a really tiny mass that generates a change in voltage when it's being pulled away from or toward it's static position.",
"there is a small weighted pedestal inside that rotates to always face down. This is also the thing that spins to make the phone vibrate."
],
"score": [
11,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gc1d19
|
Why do iPhones take a few minutes to charge before you can turn them on after the battery dies unlike things like laptops?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp8qhcn"
],
"text": [
"The short answer is that it was designed that way. With Laptops, power can bypass the battery to directly power the machine because it has additional circuitry to make this possible. With a phone you need to save on space and components, meaning the battery has to be the buffer always. Batteries need a certain charge before they can provide consistent power, and also no point in booting a phone without enough power to finish booting in the first place, say power was removed suddenly."
],
"score": [
26
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gc3ek2
|
How does WIFI signals specifically work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp91q15"
],
"text": [
"A WiFi signal is a wave. Waves have high points (tips) and low points (valleys). We agree that high is 1 and low is 0, so when you look at a WiFi signal you can turn it into 1001101 etc. The transmitter sends this wave on a certain channel, which determines how wide the waves are, and the receiver listens to that channel. The ones and zeroes are binary code, which a computer can read and turn back into text or video or whatever was sent."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gc5h91
|
How does resolution (1080p, 1440p, etc.) work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp9cbow"
],
"text": [
"A higher resolution image has more pixels available for the definition of the image. This allows for more detail, sharper images, and less fuzziness. If you display a 480p image on a 1080p screen at the same level of definition, the 480p image will be noticeably smaller, or else will appear the same size, but blockier. Windows and most programs are designed to stretch to fit the screen, and many will have font sizes, different imagery, etc, to accommodate various screen sizes, so you can effectively work while making thing look better."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gc62hl
|
When one side of my earphones stop working, why does it start working again if I move and keep the wire at a specific angle?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fp9fd80",
"fp9h0b0"
],
"text": [
"One of the wires inside the rubber sleeves is broken when you hold it at that specific angle it causes the broken ends to touch. This completes the circuit and causes it to work again.",
"Most likely a wire has broken inside the casing. When you hold it a certain way it reconnects."
],
"score": [
14,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gcd0bx
|
Why is it that .com is such a widely used suffix to websites, what does it stand for and why does it matter what the suffixes are when the DNS server converts the websites to their respective IP addresses anyways?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpamaoo",
"fpb84il",
"fpbiwrb",
"fpaotyr",
"fpb8w7m",
"fpbdom0",
"fpbgmb9",
"fpamqug",
"fpbg7uk",
"fpc8twm",
"fpawcoc",
"fpc310m",
"fpcacau",
"fpbazf4",
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],
"text": [
"In the early days of the internet there was a lot going on. When what we now call \"the web\" (meaning websites) was being spun up it was supposed to be more organized and you could tell by what suffix it had. Examples: .org - was for orgs and non-profits .edu - education .com - commercial sites .net - networks/internet infrastructure companies and sites. and so on However, pretty much the one that caught on during the \".com\" boom of the 90s was... well, .com. So .com instead just because the universal standard and no longer had any deeper meaning. > DNS server converts the websites to their respective IP addresses anyways? A website its entire address, just like your home address (in the Us) needs a house number, street, city, state, and zip code Take this: 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. Las Vegas, NV 89109 Now what if we changed just the state: 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. Las Vegas, **FL** 89109 Now thats an entirely different place right? Maybe it doesn't even exist. A website that is URL_1 and one that is URL_0 are to wholly different sites. The whole address matters",
"To answer your second question: A complete lookup of a domain name actually runs backwards, starting at the end. So say you're looking up URL_1 and you're wanting to do a full lookup rather than trusting your immediate DNS server. First off, you would start by consulting a [root name server]( URL_4 ) and asking it who controls .com. That server will then answer and direct you to a server run by Verisign, who own the .com domain. If you were instead looking up URL_3 , it would send you to Afilias, who runs .org. Or if you looked up URL_0 , it would send you to Uniregistry. Or if you asked for random.app, it would send you to Google. You'd then ask Verisign's server \"Who is the nameserver for URL_2 ?\" and it will tell you the answer. This will typically point towards a server owned by a domain registrar, like Namecheap or GoDaddy, though large sites will often operate their own. Then you ask that server \"What is the IP address for URL_1 ?\" and it gives you an answer. Lookup complete, you now know who to connect to to get the site (or other service) that you were wanting.",
"The suffixes also matter for reputation even if indeed technically it doesn't matter whether a domain is URL_1 , URL_3 , URL_2 .com has a better \"reputation\" for SEO purposes, it is seen as more trustworthy by search engines like Google etc....so that .com domains usually rank better in the search engines. (There are many more factors, like domain age, how often it changed owners, this and that, but you get the idea). So if someone wants to make a new website, it is simply better and looks more professional to use .COM rather than have a site like URL_0 or something which looks already spammy.",
"\"commercial\". People got the phrase \"dotcom\" in their heads in the early days of the Internet. It doesn't matter what you use, but some of them are supposed to have different restrictions (org is supposed to be non-profit organisations, etc.). It's just a free-for-all mess nowadays as they just charge more for the most popular ones. Some countries top-level-domains are more strictly regulated, but not always. Although, in every non-US country, lots of people will consider .com to be inappropriate unless you're a large multi-national corporation (technically the US companies should be using . URL_0 but they never do). If you're french, you're gonna prioritise .fr sites for French companies over .com - it just looks tacky and amateur to just register the .com blindly. I have had this argument at several prestigious companies who \"had to\" have the .com and every extension they could get their hands on (.eu and so on). Eventually they all realise that you only need one, it makes no difference what it is, and having one controlled by your own country's legislation works out far better (e.g. all the uk companies just got booted off .eu, .com's can be shut down by the US registry whereas . URL_1 has to go through Nominet, and so on).",
"First of all, a clarification on some other answer: .com was *not* intended for commercial websites. .com was not intended for *any* websites. .com was created 6 years before the web even existed. So if it was never meant to be used with the web, what was it designed for? The DNS system (mapping names to addresses) was designed for computers. In the early days of the Internet, each connected computer had a unique address. People started giving names to their computers because they were easier to remember than addresses. At first, the names didn't have .com at the end. In fact they didn't have a . in them at all. In the early days of the Internet, computers had only a single word as their name, like \"georgeoffice\" or \"jenny\" or something like that. The problem is: if you called your computer \"jenny\" and someone else also called their computer \"jenny\", how would you distinguish between them? Well, maybe you work at AT & T Labs and the other person works at MIT. So yours is now called \"jenny.att\" and the other one is \"jenny.mit\". The . in between those names created a hierarchy that could more specifically identify one computer on the Internet. But now there's another problem. Maybe someone at the Manukau Institute of Technology (also called MIT) has named their computer \"jenny\". How do you distinguish *that* MIT's jenny from the other MIT's \"jenny\"? Okay so you add one more level to your hierarchy: jenny.mit.usa vs URL_0 And so and and so on. This process has to stop at some point. The point at which it stops is called the \"top level\". The things at the very rightmost end of a computer's name is called its \"top level domain\". com, edu, org. nz, fr, etc., are all top level domains. The original com/edu/org/net/gov/mil/int taxonomy (commercial organizations, education organizations, non-profit organizations, networking organizations, governmental organizations, military organizations, international organizations) is a holdover from long before the web ever existed, from when the Internet was a US project. In the old days, these were the only 7 possible top level domains. As the Internet became more internationalized, other countries adopted their own country codes. The US technically has one (.us), but it's rarely used because so many organizations had already established a domain in the com/edu/org/net/gov/mil/int system. Since established companies were using .com, newer companies started using .com, too, to look legit. There's no requirement that com/etc. organizations should be in the US. These days the designation of .com is almost completely meaningless. But it's still a necessary organizational tool to make sure computers with a name don't conflict with other computers with the same name somewhere else.",
"As an added note, it's really important to learn to read a URL to avoid fake sites. It's all about the slashes. For example: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) The domain, what is going to actually translate into an actual IP address, is between // and the first single /. In this case, \"[ URL_1 ](https:// URL_1 )\". The stuff after the first single / is used to find what you want on the site, in the old days it was an actual directory structure but now it can be lots of stuff. Back to the URL. Look at this one: [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 ). It kind of looks like reddit at first glance once again, look between the // and the first / and you see [ URL_3 ]( URL_2 ) instead of [ URL_1 ](https:// URL_1 ) (.ru is Russia). When you get there, it might even look like reddit but it isn't. Just thought I'd add this for anyone who cares.",
"Top Level Domains (TLD) are like private clubs, some with very strict rules on who can be a member - .gov, .mil - and some pretty chill about who can join - .com, .net. The Domain Naming Servers (DNS) don’t care what the TLD is as long as they know how to get the mapping to the IP address. As a website builder it is your choice which club you want to be member of, buy the ‘membership’ from the club owners (domain registrars or resellers), and then update the DNS config to point to your website. .com historically represented ‘commercial’ but now is available more generally to everyone. URL_0",
"The suffix \".com\" originally meant that it was a company's website. Suffix \".gov\" is a government website, \".uk\" is the United Kingdom, and so on. Sometimes there will be two sites with the same name, but different suffixes. Here is a list URL_0",
"I'm not sure if anyone really answered the second part of your question, but the answer is that DNS is a distributed system. Besides providing handy organization, the root domains provide a way to divide up the work of resolving names to multiple points. It's not so big of a deal now because of improvements to DNS and the overall advancement of technology.",
"> why does it matter what the suffixes are when the DNS server converts the websites to their respective IP addresses anyways? To answer the second part of your question, it matters because there are more than one suffix and a name doesn't have to be unique across all suffixes. For example, URL_5 , URL_1 and URL_0 all go to very different sites. Similarly, sometimes a given site uses multiple suffixes to disambiguate aspects of their services, especially across .com and .org, but also by country such as URL_2 vs URL_4 . The suffix part is called a top-level domain or TLD. There are over 1,000 TLDs including: * The original edu, com, gov, int, mil, net and org * The internal and testing oriented local and localhost * The national TLDs (two-character country codes such as us and uk) * The sundry new business and category domains such as academy and accountant. [Here's a comprehensive list]( URL_3 ).",
"A piggyback question: Why are .io domains so expensive in comparison to pretty much every other suffix?",
"Remember when you use to have a single area code, then over time more phones were being bought, then the cell phone boom, then people were like heck NO, I don't want THAT area code, WTF is that...there u go...",
"The .com suffix stands for \"commercial\", that's why it's widely used, commercial companies use it who want to sell stuff. Each suffix has a meaning, however nowadays these lose their importance, because everbody can register a domain with any suffix. It doesn't matter when it comes to DNS servers, they just resolve the domain to IP afaik.",
"These are called TLDs or top level domains such as .com .org, etc. Nowadays, all sorts of TLDs are available and even beyond English letters. Like .order or .builder or anything like that. The IP addresses are hard to remember and gets confusing if you have lot of websites to check, hence the URLs. The suffix is just a part of URL.",
"IIRC, .com is short for commercial, the original idea being that most business are commercial ventures, or something to that effect. The suffix should, in theory, allow you to differentiate what types of websites there are (com and biz for businesses, org for nonprofit, me for personal, tv and UK for country codes to denote Transylvanian or UK websites, etc). The suffix allow multiple entities to use the same name for their website, I.e. URL_1 vs URL_0 instead of being forced to come up with a new website name because the .com version was already taken. On a related sidenote, to help prevent competition from using their name, I have seen many companies buy up all the alternative names (biz, org, blog, xxx, me, etc) to prevent others fron using them against them. Hopefully this helps!"
],
"score": [
5671,
329,
229,
86,
59,
16,
14,
7,
7,
4,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"www.reddit.edu",
"www.reddit.com"
],
[
"random.xxx",
"foo.random.com",
"random.com",
"random.org",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server"
],
[
"politics-news.info",
"website.com",
"website.biz",
"website.info"
],
[
"co.us",
"co.uk"
],
[
"jenny.mit.nz"
],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/blahblahblah",
"www.reddit.com",
"https://www.reddit.1322.ru/r/politics/blahblahblah",
"www.reddit.1322.ru",
"https://www.reddit.com"
],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains"
],
[
"https://pc.net/resources/internet/domain_suffixes"
],
[],
[
"dc.edu",
"dc.gov",
"amazon.ca",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains",
"amazon.co.uk",
"dc.com"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"linux.org",
"Linux.com"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gce1am
|
How did humans get to harness and use electricity?
|
I had always heard about Benjamin Franklin and his kite and key, so what happened between that and when Edison was able to turn on a lightbulb?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fparqcr",
"fpaspn9",
"fpb002x",
"fpb5je8"
],
"text": [
"Some dudes were fucking around with magnets and found out that if you spin a magnet really fast around a conductive metal, a bunch of electrons jump out, and if you pump a bunch of electrons into a magnet, the magnet will spin. You mix that together and you can make things move with this spinning magnet, conductive metal combo.",
"Even before Franklin, people knew about electricity. His kite experiment was meant to show that lightning was electricity. People has chemical batteries, possibly as far back as when the Egyptian pyramids were build. Static electricity was used for lots of parlor tricks too.",
"In ancient times the electricity was known only as static electricity, the one you generate by walking with rubber shoes on carpets or by the ligthning. This was very hard to understand becasue it takes time to generate and lasts very few time. at the beginning of 1800 [Alessandro Volta]( URL_0 ) invented the first battery. Now humanity have a realiable source of eclectricity for strudy purpose that can last days. A lot of great scientist can now begin to work and in few times they discover such as the libk between electricity and magnets ( [Ampere]( URL_1 ) ) The laws of resistence ( by [ohm]( URL_2 ) The electric engines ( multiple scientist do this separately) Basing on those prelimiary work the ligth bulb has been possibile. Note that Edison only patented a realiable way to produce the ligth bulb, the ligth bulb itself was already invented Franklin did the kyte and key thing to show that ligthning are made of electricity, as he thougth.",
"There's a great book with all the details about the early days of electricity. It's called \"Draw the Lightning Down\" by Michael Schiffer [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) Also, here's a fun article [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 )"
],
"score": [
30,
7,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta?wprov=sfla1",
"https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9-Marie_Amp%C3%A8re?wprov=sfla1",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ohm?wprov=sfla1"
],
[
"https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520248298/draw-the-lightning-down",
"https://www.electricbike.com/a-history-of-all-these-weird-electrical-terms/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gchqew
|
Why do sparks happen?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpbf9zc"
],
"text": [
"Electrical sparks happen because the electrons in air molecules get ripped off, pulled by nearby high voltage, and smack other electrons causing a cascade that forms an arc. This arc may be what you are referring to. The less air, the lower the necessary voltage, so when you disconnect two pieces of metal with electricity running, there is initially only a tiny bit of air between them and this allows for an arc."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gcjx87
|
How do headphones have selective noise cancellation?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpbsgmm",
"fpbtrm0"
],
"text": [
"They have microphones on them. They listen to the noise around you. So let’s say it hears a specific sound, then it produces the inverted sound to that to cancel it out.",
"Answer: there is a microphone that listens for repeating sounds around you, the ambient sound of a car or jet engine would be a good example of these types of sounds. When it has identified a sound, it plays an inversion of that sound so they when you hear them both together it cancels out to silence. The result is you only hear your music and none of the background noise. This technique only works on ambient sounds, so for a sudden and unexpected sound, it will have no effect."
],
"score": [
8,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gclm3c
|
What's the difference between OLED and AMOLED? And which is better when it comes to phone?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpc5qw0"
],
"text": [
"Pretty much the same, amoled is from Samsung and they have been going at it for a longer time, worked out most of the kinks and is more reliable. Oled is from LG among others, many people online have complained about its lack of quality compared to samsung"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gcprwb
|
What dictates the maximum framerate of a PC game?
|
Let's say my character has a specific animation that lasts exactly 1 second. was that animation not made frame-by-frame? In which case the whole animation is comprised of (for example) exactly 120 frames that play over one second. If I run the game at 60fps then it makes sense that the animation will skip every other frame. But if I run it at 240fps will it just "add" artificial frames? Thanks for helping me understand this better!
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpcr316",
"fpcqkle"
],
"text": [
"Animations these days aren't made frame by frame, they are made with keyframes. A keyframe is a specific pose that has been made by an animator, or obtained from motion capture. Keyframes may occur at regular intervals, or they may be irregular times. When the game plays the animation it interpolates between key frames. So say an animation was authored at 30 keyframes a second, but the game is running at 60 fps it means every other frame the animation will be half way between two keyframes. The basics of interpolation are pretty simple. Imagine in one keyframe a character's arm is out straight, and in the next the elbow is bent 90 degrees. If a game's frame happens at the half way point between those two keyframes then the elbow will be bent 45 degrees. There are more advanced ways to do interpolation, but the principle is the same.",
"No, animations (and events in games in general) are not usually made frame by frame. Most games base things like that on time. And since the game knows exactly how long the most recent frame took to be shown on the screen, it can sync everything up. There are counter-examples such as Bethesda's engine, which ties things to frame-rate such that exceeding the default frame-rate of 60 per second results in issues in everything from dialogue playback to object physics to load screen graphics to minigames. However, even in that case, animations are not made frame by frame."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gcrcng
|
why do password managers suggest passwords that are complicated for humans but not for machines?
|
[Some articles]( URL_0 ) suggest using pass-phrases over passwords, but password managers like Chrome or LastPass rely on rather short strings which are only difficult for humans but not necessarily to prevent brute force attacks. Why?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpcysx7"
],
"text": [
"A pass phrase, or long string made up or words may be useful if you need to remember a password. With a password manager the point is you don’t need to remember it. Last time I looked at a auto password from chrome it was at least 16 random characters which is pretty much a non starter for brute force, especially if chrome prompts to change it at regular intervals (don’t know if chrome or other password managers do this)"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gcrq0j
|
Why does turning airplane mode on and then off sometime fix my internet issues for a very short period?
|
Occasionally, I have great signal on my phone but absolutely no internet connection for some reason. When this happens, if I turn airplane mode on and then off again my internet connection comes back for a short period of about a minute. Asking around, apparently I'm not the only one that does this. Why does this happen?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpd1ycs"
],
"text": [
"Possible explanation: When your cell phone connects to a cell tower, it remembers the last one it successfully connected to. That doesn’t necessarily mean the one your phone is connected to is the closest / best connection available. When you cycle through airplane mode, your phone forgets what tower it’s connected to, so it starts looking for one all over again. It’s the same process of how “turn it off and on again” can solve so many router issues. This might solve any hangups that might be caused by that tower. Now why your internet goes back out after 1 min? Not sure about that, get a tech to check out your device. Helpful note: you can switch on a secret mode for both Apple and android to display your current signal strength. Google “how to measure signal strength for phone”"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gct5ju
|
how did old cartridge based games like earthbound detect if they were pirated
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpdcbvr"
],
"text": [
"The original NES + SNES had a lockout chip call the CIC (Checking Integrated Circuit) that would check if your cartridge had a corresponding authentication chip (10NES chip supplied by Nintendo) to prove it was authentic. Unlicensed developers still found ways around this including disabling the chip with a voltage spike on boot, creating there own pseudo-legal copies of the 10NES chips, or using a weird dongle that you would connect a legit cartridge to borrow it's chip. What's more interesting is why Nintendo was so stringent on approving game manufactures. Nintendo management felt that the video game crash of the early 80's was cause by Atari not reigning in it's 3rd party developers and allowed for a glut of low quality games to flood the market. By enforcing who could get the 10NES chips, and limiting game companies to only releasing a certain number of games per year, Nintendo hoped to reign in the 3rd parties so that the quality of games would be better. Overall they were pretty successful, but the Angry Video Game Nerd has proved anything it's that LGN somehow consistently got around this screening process to release crap."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gctkje
|
how can a computer turn itself on
|
When you restart your computer, it has to shut down and then turn itself back on. My question is, if it's totally off how can it have the power and understanding to turn itself on again?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpdbzt6",
"fpdgmv7"
],
"text": [
"So believe it or not - when you turn \"off\" your computer, depending on the motherboard and other specifics, you are actually putting it in a \"low power state\" and a smaller computer is running in the background listening for signals (either from a physical interrupt from the power button or some allow network cards to accept a signal to turn on over the internet/network). Perry much universally, all off these smaller computers have a signal for \"shut down all the power and start up again please.\" This signal is what is sent when you \"restart.\"",
"The short answer is because it's not actually \"totally off.\" It's in what's called a *soft shutdown state*, which is a very different beast from actually shutting the machine off. A reboot under these conditions is typically called a *soft reboot* or a *warm reboot*, and the machine is only clearing certain sections of memory rather than completely restarting itself from zero. The longer answer is, naturally, more complicated. There are three types of system shutdown and restart. The simplest and quickest is a *soft reboot* or *warm reboot*. When the restart command is received in the system BIOS, the system shuts down running applications and closes the operating system, setting a bit in protected memory that serves as a signal (called a *flag*) to BIOS that the system is in a soft reboot. BIOS runs as normal, clears the signal bit, and launches the OS. The key element here is that power is never interrupted, so the time-consuming hardware starts and checks don't happen, saving time and speeding the boot process. A *cold reboot* is a more effective restart, sometimes needed when there's a serious problem. BIOS receives a shutdown command but does not set any flag bits. The OS is shut down and BIOS executes its shutdown instructions, interrupting the power supply. This is an instruction the system can't clear itself as the power supply to the system board is shut off. The user (or an external auto-restart system) needs to send the command via the power button to restart. This wipes the system memory and cache and completely resets the processor, as well as forcing the system through its normal start-up checks (like POST), allowing the system to both clear anything that may be a problem in memory as well as check its hardware for faults. The final one is a subset of a cold reboot called a *hard reboot* or a *hard shutdown*. Unlike the other two methods, no orderly shutdown of applications and OS is executed - the system powers off immediately. This is usually done by holding down the power button for several seconds and only as a last resort, when other shutdown methods have failed. This immediately pulls power from the system board, causing memory to blank and putting everything into a restart state. However, a bit flag called a *dirty bit* remains set. When BIOS starts, it notices the dirty bit is set and that the previous shutdown was *not* a normal shutdown, so there may be problems. System cache files are wiped, processor cache is actively purged, the processors are reset, and hardware checks are performed. Frequently, a basic system check is run to ensure the system is stable. This is because a hard shutdown can occur due to hardware or critical software failure, and without these checks the machine could get stuck in an endless shutdown-restart-shutdown-restart loop. Only after the checks are passed is the OS loaded. These last two states are the only time power to the system board is actually interrupted, making it necessary for outside action to get the system running again. A soft reboot does not do this, meaning the system is still in control and remains \"live\" through the entire process."
],
"score": [
15,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gcvuld
|
How do chess games have coded different level of difficulties. Do they have different efficiency of programs or what?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpdpwil",
"fpe2a02",
"fped27h",
"fpemu0j"
],
"text": [
"Sometimes, particularly in the opening book phase of the game. Most of the time, the chess difficulty is controlled by varying the size of the move search tree considered by the algorithm. In easy mode it might look at all its moves and all of your moves, a search depth of 2 plys. In medium mode it might look 5-6 plys deep in the best half of the moves. In expert mode it might look 8-10 plys deep at all of the moves.",
"A chess algorithm simplified has two parts. a ) An opening book that lists off common moves. b ) A search algorithm that looks X moves ahead. In order to increase or decrease the difficulty you can either limit the number of moves the computer can take from the opening book, or make X smaller so that it doesn't look as far ahead.",
"In addition to the other answers, you stop the search at a certain level. You then have to assign some value to the possible outcomes. A chess program can then, based on the selected difficulty choose to do the best move it found or a worse one.",
"Ok, to put this in ELI5 terms: A chess program basically works out the best possible move each turn by working out possibilities. When you make a move, it will look at all the possible moves it can make in return. Then it will 'simulate' all those moves, and then simulate all the ways you could respond to all *those* moves... then simulate all the ways it could respond to *that...*repeat. Basically, each move the game will simulate every way the game *could* go for so many moves ahead, then pick the option that gives it the best chance of winning. The thing is, there are an almost infinite number of ways a chess game can go, so chess programs will only look so many moves ahead and only plan ahead for the most likely moves you'll make (the ones that will give you the best chance of winning)... so the most common way to adjust the difficult of a chess game is to limit the number of moves it can work out ahead of time. So, if a chess game has already worked out every possible move you could make for the next ten turns, it will be really difficult to beat. It knows everything you could possible do in the next ten turns and has worked out the best way to block you... but a chess game that is only looking two or three moves ahead, and not for every possible move will be much easier."
],
"score": [
16,
8,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gcwp1h
|
how does an LCD screen show an image?
|
How does this piece of metal, glass, and silicon show images that the human eye and mind recognize?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpdvm5q"
],
"text": [
"Hi :-) LCD stands for liquid crystal display. So next to glass and metal, there are also these crystals... and filters. The liquid crystal reacts to electricity, and changes the way light passes. With some polarization-filters this can make parts of the image transparent or opaque. Light-polarization is basically in which way the light-wave moves, and certain filters can block certain directions. So if you have a filter that only lets horizontal waves through, and the liquid crystal can block horizontal waves, you can block all light, and thus turn a pixel on or off. LC-Displays contain three sub-pixel (red green blue) for every pixel. So your screen has a lot of tiny controlled shutters :-)"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gcxhle
|
Why do video games usually have a "Press A to start"? Why can't they just take you to directly to a menu screen or something else?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpe07ka"
],
"text": [
"They certainly could but the designers want to let the player decide when to enter the game. Maybe they have gone for a drink or to the bathroom or are talking to someone so they are not ready to start immediately. Pressing \"A\" to start allows the player to say they are ready to go."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gcy62j
|
Why are some 720p YouTube videos larger in size than 1080p?
|
[Like this]( URL_0 )
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpe4ll5"
],
"text": [
"Hi :-) Different video compression codecs! Youtube uses older codecs for lower resolution videos, to ensure downward compatibility (e.g. old smart TVs). One reason is that even with software-updates of older devices, the processors might not be capable of decoding the newer (more \"complicated\") video codecs."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gcy80g
|
How is pirating content so common and illegal yet nobody faces consequences for doing it?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpe55qv",
"fpe4ict",
"fpeagt2"
],
"text": [
"People do face consequences for it. The problem is that piracy is so wide spread that there aren't enough resources to fine and arrest everyone that does it. The agencies try to focus on content distributors to try to slow piracy down, but also target random downloaders with large fines to try to get media attention to scare people into stopping. The other problem is jurisdiction. Pirate websites are deliberately hosted in countries where US agencies have no jurisdiction so it takes a lot of effort to get the sites taken down. Agencies also have come to realize that spending all these resources to shut down sites like the Pirate Bay is ultimately futile, because if the site goes offline 3 new sites prop up to take it's place within a week. Big companies like Disney have also changed tactics deciding to start streaming services instead. After decades of online piracy companies have finally started to realize that a lot of people don't pirate to save money, they do it because it's a more convenient way to consume media. The idea being that if you provide people with the same or better level of quality and convenience as BitTorrent for a reasonable fee then people will stop pirating.",
"The short answer is people do face consequences for it. But the resources don’t exist to file charges against everyone and prosecute them in a timely manner. So they focus on the big fish.",
"To add to what DarkAlman wrote. Even if you face charges it's very easy to get out of in most countries. This is due to it not being your fault if someone else downloads something illegal through your internet connection. So even if they can prove that for example Inglorious Basterds were downloaded through your internet connection at 6:15 AM on 10. Feb 2012, then they don't have much of a case against you. They (some shady law firm) might send you a letter claiming that you owe them 2500,- DKK and they will take you to court if you don't pay them. Also if you don't reply within 14 days they will automatically win the case and you will then actually owe them 2500,-. Luckily, such a letter can easily be countered with an email containing some legally sounding words which TL:DR says \"Nah man, wasn't me. And you can't prove it\". They (still the shady law firm) will then reply with another attempt to scare you, which will say something to the extent of: \"you clearly just found a standard response letter online, which is dangerous and you still owe us\". To this mail you then write them \"*you* clearly just wrote a standard response to what you claim was a standard response from me, since you didn't even mention the fact that I Rick Roll'ed you in my last response (hint: remember to Rick Roll them in your initial email to them). And since you haven't brought up any new evidence I now consider this case closed\". This will now finally stop them from bothering you. The above is in no way based on real events and has no relation to the actions /u/Brewe. No way Jose. Wasn't me. so OPUS, you can just shove it up your shady arse (OPUS is the shady lawfirm that I in no way have been in contact with for anything that I did or didn't do)."
],
"score": [
55,
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gd3axv
|
Where does stuff go when it is deleted?
|
If a file is deleted where does it go? What happens to it?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpf1xdc",
"fpf2z23",
"fpf7vnc"
],
"text": [
"Nothing actually. The data is still there. But the space its stored in is now allocated as \"free\" and can be overwritten at any time by something else being saved. There are programs that actively \"wipe\" the drive for security reasons and overwrite the data, but typically when you delete something it just removes references to the actual data and marks it as available space",
"The PC marks the file as deleted. It's still there for a short while. As time goes on, the computer will write other information over it and eventually the file is just gone. Memory chips and hard drives have a lifespan for reading/writing. In order to make the lifespan longer, the chips or drives only change the bits of information when it is absolutely needed. So your files (all the bits of 1's and 0's) stay in the same place and don't change until the computer needs the space. Then it writes something over it. If the bit needs to be a zero and there's a one in that spot, it changes. If there's already a zero, the PC leaves it alone. Changing the bit wears out that location. Eventually it will burn out and become unusable. Then the chip/drive marks that spot unusable and writes that to another file table to make sure it doesn't use that spot ever again.",
"Pretend that there is a 'manager' in control of your storage drive. Imagine that this manager has a list of all the locations on a drive, and each one either is labeled as occupied or emptied. If you want to create a new file, you go to the manager, say, \"I need this much space,\" and he will give you the location to put the new file. That space will be marked as occupied and you can dump all the data there. When you delete a file, the contents of the file are the biggest part. A file could be as big as several terabytes, but the location that the manager knows is just a few lines on some list. It takes so much effort to get rid of all the data, so instead, we just leave it there. However, we tell the manager \"ok, this space over here is empty now.\" He'll change it to be available, but all the data is still in that space, for now. The manager is totally allowed to- and will- give another file that same space. If this happens, it will overwrite all the previous data."
],
"score": [
27,
8,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gd57fe
|
Why does artificial intelligence seem so advanced while language translation software still seems unreliable?
|
I’m pretty sure AI can generate well written stories on its own. Why is translation software still unreliable? Couldn’t AI be used to make translations better?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpff1xn",
"fpfduyc",
"fpfejeq"
],
"text": [
"It's because different languages have different perspectives and ideas and how they think about the word. So it's not just choosing what word translates (and not every word has a direct translation) but also the context and meaning. A simple example is with English to Spanish. In English we say \"I am hungry and thirsty\" but in Spanish they would say \"Tengo hambre y sed\" which literally means I have hunger and thirst. So does the software literally translate word for word. Or does it change the words to keep the meaning. And how does it know which one I want. Or we can say \"I'm awkward with you, I like being awkward.\" Well Spanish doesn't have the word awkward the closest word is incomodo, \"Estoy incomodo contigo me gusta ser imcomodo\" But incomodo literally means uncomfortable. But it's not uncomfortable being awkward. Being uncomfortable is when something physically doesn't fit or work but awkward is like when something abstract doesn't fit in. That nuance doesn't exist in Spanish. You might like or enjoy being new to learning a language and are okay with being awkward in conversations in a new language. But you might be comfortable in that awkwardness. Also to be( and it's conjugations like I am, we are, he is, etc) has 2 possible translations in Spanish one is Ser for permanent things, the other is estoy for temporary things. So in the sentence \"I'm awkward with you\" is temporary, but \"I like being awkward\" is a permanent state of being. \"To Be or Not To Be\" has a very interesting feel depending on which \"to be\" you use in Spanish. It's not that AI can't learn all these. and it is, it's just not there yet with every single language into every single other language. English to Spanish is actually pretty good. But take Hindu to Hawaiian and that might be a bigger gap. Let alone between three less translated languages like Hindu to Hawaiian to Amharic.",
"Language is insanely complicated. We can fairly reliably translate simple sentences. When you run into problems is translating a concept from language to another language which lacks that concept, translating complicated meaning or metaphors, and other similar things which are about more than just single words. Edit: regarding the AI point IIRC it is used but see above for why it is still difficult.",
"The AI that generates stories is basically just imitating stories that it's been given as examples. It's not like the AI you see in sci-fi movies that truly understand language and think up a story to tell. Translating complex concepts is difficult for even humans to do. AI concepts can be used to improve translations, certainly, but it's not the same as making a program that can spit out a story."
],
"score": [
7,
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gd7eeb
|
How can a CD, which is just a piece of metal and plastic, store data so efficiently?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpfqc0r",
"fpfsxu6"
],
"text": [
"Very very very small differences in the metal disc. Just zeros and ones in a massive collection. A laser ‘reads’ it and the data is collected, wether it be music or information only a computer could understand.",
"The way a CD works is there's a continuous spiral track that holds all the data. The track is read by shooting a laser at it and watching how its reflection gets brighter or dimmer. It's just like a vinyl record, but tinier, and with a needle made of light. The track stores the data in the spiral in one of two ways. If you bought the disc with data already on it, there's a good chance it was a pressed disk. The spiral is covered in microscopic bumps that cause the laser's reflection to go in and out of focus. The bumps are created by stamping them into the disc with a master press, same general way vinyls are made. If the disc was blank and is advertised as a \"writeable\" disc, these discs are covered in a dye that changes color when heated. Instead of bumps, these discs have bright and dark patches in the track, which to a scanning laser looks the same. This is why writing to a CD is called \"burning\", you are literally burning that dye with a powerful laser."
],
"score": [
8,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gd7wau
|
How does cpu work?
|
i mean its basically a thinking rock and this might be a little bit to complicated to fit in a reddit comment but if someone has an explanation that fits then please share
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpfstw7",
"fpfta62"
],
"text": [
"There's a lot to it, but basically it is a very large number of simple electronic components called logic gates all connected together. A logic gate has one or more inputs and lets current pass under certain conditions, such as \"if both inputs have current coming in, then send current out, otherwise don't\". By combining these gates in a certain way, we can make them add numbers together. Combine these \"adders\" in the right way and you can multiply numbers, and so on. If you want to get a better understanding, I recommend the YouTube series \"Crash Course Computing\", which explains this (and much more) simply and from the ground up.",
"It's a bunch of electrically controlled switches connected by wires. Specific arrangements of a switches and wires make a logic operation. EG put two input wires to control the position of switches, put those switches one after another controlling a third wire called out. And you have an AND gate. Wire these logic gates together and you got something that can do things like math. So like you wire a bunch of logic gates together and it can add. you put that on the chip. Wire a bunch of logic gates together and it can subtract. You put that on the chip somewhere else. Now make a bank of switches, give it a fancy name \"instruction register\". depending on the configuration of the switches, power goes to the group of gates you made that add one particular bunch of switches to another, you flip a different combination power goes to the one that subtracts. More importantly, flip a combination of switches, and it flips the switches on the instruction register to be the same as another bank of switches."
],
"score": [
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gd8g01
|
how does URL_0 work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpfyv40",
"fpg1qbr"
],
"text": [
"[ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) uses Artificial Intelligence to generate fake faces, the site was created by a guy called Phil Wang. Here's some more information about the website, as said by it's creator: This site instantly educates the public on an important subfield in artificial intelligence named GANs (generative adversarial networks). This technique allows the machine to dream up new data indistinguishable to the training data. Keeping the site up for longer will help inform more of the public on what is possible today and keep people from becoming victims to faked images in the future. 80 million unique people informed to date.",
"Imagine an algorithm, that can generate human face and algorithm, that can measure how good that face is. Now set two generating algorithm against each other and set measuring algorithm as a jury. Now after each generation opposing algorithm will try better, until some precision will be reached. And that's why GAN is good at generating. Bonus part: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://thispersondoesnotexist.com",
"thispersondoesnotexist.com"
],
[
"https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/research/ai-playground/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gd8zcb
|
Why does installing a game take so long compared to uninstalling one?
|
Or installing anything else for that matter...
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpfxqfx",
"fpfxrgi"
],
"text": [
"The installation downloads a bunch of files, writes them to disc, etc. The uninstall just tells the computer \"Files A, B, and C were only for this game, and they're on the disc in location XYZ. Just forget about them.\" It's like how deleting a video can take just a moment; it's still on the disc. The computer can overwrite it later, because as far as it's concerned that part of the disc is empty, but the actual data hasn't been erased.",
"So when you uninstall a game you don't actually have to overwrite the data. You just tell the drive that it is allowed to write over it. It isn't actually deleted when you uninstall. When you are installing the game you actually have to write that data to the drive."
],
"score": [
16,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gd9f7n
|
Why is it that whenever we hear about "defense spending" it's always on offensive things like weapons? Is there not a way to make actual defense the priority instead of offense?
|
I could be missing the point about military spending, and the five-year-old in my head asking the question does just want forcefields over every country in the end.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpg039n",
"fpgnolm",
"fpg0jqb",
"fpg1te4",
"fpg9frz"
],
"text": [
"Turtling up just means you slow down your defeat - or at least make it a drawn out mess until your attacker runs out of money or gets bored. The best method for stopping an attack since prehistoric times has been grabbing a big ol club and krumping whoever is harassing you. Of course if you screw up your krumping strategy you *might* spend the next twenty years throwing lives and money into a bottomless pit in a desert on the other side of the globe. Edit: also calling it the \"defense budget\" instead of the \"attack budget\" has better PR looks.",
"It's marketing. In the case of the US, the thing we call the \"Department of Defense\" was called the \"Department of War\" up until 1947. In Britain, the War Office became the Ministry of Defense in 1964. Thing is, no matter what you call it, all military spending and action is supposed to do the same thing- change someone else's behavior to achieve a political goal of your country's. Basic [Clausewitz]( URL_0 )- war is the extension of politics by other means. So if you have a stack of nuclear weapons sufficient to inform any country that invasion will be met with annihilation? It does what you wanted it to do- prevents them from invading. If you can park an aircraft carrier off someone's coast and suggest they change their recent policy decisions? Job done. Military violence isn't done to kill people and break stuff, it's done to persuade. There's not a clear division between offense and defense when you look at it that way.",
"It's just semantics. It sounds less aggressive if it's called defense spending. Offensive wars are generally frowned upon by international law (such as it is), plus, many more people are likely to support military spending when you say it's for defense (after all, who doesn't want to feel safe and protected?), so it's largely a public relations thing. On a more practical note though, there's a fair amount of overlap between offensive and defensive weapons. The very same gun used to slaughter innocent people in cold blood (an offensive act) can be used to kill the person doing the slaughtering (a defensive act). It's enough of a grey area that people can argue cruise missiles are defensive weapons (although whether or not you buy that is up to you).",
"Something not touched upon by anyone so far is the fact that defensive technologies of sufficient efficacy do not exist, if defense against a particular threat is even possible. Someone walks up to you, shoots at you, what's the defense? A bunker? Apart from now having to essentially flee from your pre-war life, arguably the the first \"loss\" of the war, you are sitting in a bunker where the enemy can attack you at their leisure. Modern technology such as it is, we can breach bunkers. You're actually better protected when the enemy doesn't know where you are, but if you're not stopping boots on the ground (at the least) from searching for you, you don't stay hidden for long, and this ignores the fact that you can't hide the people of a country nor their assets (survive but have a destroyed economy, yay). The only way to protect your people is to eliminate the enemies will and ability to prosecute (go after) your people. You can't do that using defensive technologies, because we don't have forcefields and limitless power. You have to launch more missiles than they fire at you to have a good probability of shooting them down. You can mine a road, but if you don't harass the enemy then they can disarm it at their pleasure. I understand that this question comes from a place of good natured ignorance, but I daresay that this question did come from the five year old in your head, because it just makes no sense.",
"Because such a defensive system do not exist in real life. I know that you didn't meant real forcefields, but there isn't much of anything else that could do similar job. There is still some item in the military that serve a defensive purpose like anti-air defense that are there to protect the country against air attack. Weirdly enough, nuclear weapons brough more peace that any defensive system in history. The fear of mutal destruction had a powerful effect of calming everybody down."
],
"score": [
50,
18,
13,
13,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz"
],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gdc1tq
|
How do CDs/DVDs/game disks work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpgepfy",
"fpgesde"
],
"text": [
"The shiny layers on the disks have tiny groves cut into them in circles around the center. These groves are only a few hundred nanometers wide which is just wide enough for a laser beam. So the disk reader have a laser shining at this grove and a detector that detects the reflection of the laser. This means that it can detect where the grove is cut and where the reflective surface is left intact as the disk spins around. This forms a pattern of ones and zeroes that gets converted into data for the rest of the machine to read.",
"All computer data ultimately breaks down into a series of ones and zeros. This gets represented on an optical disk (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/etc) by a series of pits and bumps in the surface of the disk, almost like a vinyl record. Those pits and bumps are under a clear sheet of polycarbonate on the disk (so you can't feel them). To read them, a laser (a highly focused beam of light) is run along the disk and the deflection (or not) of the beam is read as a 1 or a 0. The primary differences in the different types of media are the wavelength of the laser, which allows data to be stored more closely together on the physical disk. In some cases, the data can actually be written in two or more layers on the disk and the beam is focused on different depths in the surface of the disk to read them."
],
"score": [
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gddlus
|
How do they make the revving sounds for cars in video games?
|
It‘s hard to explain how I think this is so complex... basically in a video game you can change the throttle a lot. How do they adapt the noise of the engine to throttle changes? Sorry if that sounded stupid.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpgpdkg"
],
"text": [
"There are two paths to our digital sounds in games - sampling and synthesizing and then combos of those. Synthesized sounds are built from the ground up as designed waveforms and samples are recordings of things that are then made controlled by the game (or a keyboard, midi controller, computer, etc.). So..for your example, they may literally sample a car at different levels of throttle and then digitally \"smooth\" the transition between them and put that overall affect at the control of your player. They may also just have a sample of different levels of throttle and let you move through that sample forward and back with the control of your player."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gddvpe
|
How did prosthetics in the 16th century work exactly?
|
I was reading a post about Götz von Berlichingen and apparently he lost his hand . He got a prosthetic made of metal and was said to be able to hold a quill and write with it . How would that work exactly because I wouldn't think that putting a metal hand over a forearm would allow for any use.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpgsane"
],
"text": [
"Short answer: springs designed to hold the fingers in any position they were placed: \"The first of these was a simple device that consisted of a glove with a thumb and fingers attached to it, and is said to have been made by a village blacksmith and saddle maker. The fingers could be brought inward, hence allowing Gotz to grip his sword. Some aesthetic attention was paid to the prosthetic during the creation, as certain life-like details where found on it. For instance, sculpted fingernails and wrinkles at the knuckles can be seen on it. The second device extended to the end of the knight’s forearm, and was held in place with a leather strap. Gotz decided to have joints on its fingers, which offered him a better grip of his weapon. Furthermore, spring-loaded mechanisms were placed within the hand, which allowed the fingers to be locked into place. With this prosthesis he was able to hold the reins of his horse, and even pick up a quill to write.\" [Sourcey-source]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://www.historynaked.com/gotz-iron-hand/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gdeq2w
|
Why did old video games look so realistic during their time but look super unrealistic today?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpgxpq2",
"fpgvirk",
"fpgv9z0",
"fpgzuas"
],
"text": [
"Super low res TVs. Its the same reason some movies don't look as good as they used to. We went from 14inch low res tvs to 65 inch 4k super HD tvs with Dolby audio and quantum dot technology.",
"Yeah I don't think anyone actually thought video games were ever \"realistic\" until relatively recently. As was stated in the thread, it was more about \"this is good as it gets! This is way better than 8 bit, 64 bit, etc.\"",
"Imo, old video games did not look realistic in ther respective time (talking PS1 - PS3/XBOX360 era). It was just as it was state of the art, one would consider it \"as close to realism\" as we get, so we make an effort to believe. Also, although very subjective, having a great light setup and properly mimicking focus points helps a game's believability very much.",
"Not an answer but a supporting statement: I set up a MAME box the other day and when my friend started playing the games she kept saying \"This isn't the game I played in the 80s, that had really good graphics\". It's like her memory had upscaled the graphics on them all."
],
"score": [
12,
12,
12,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gdfukt
|
Why are 4k TVs so much cheaper than 4k monitors even though they are bigger?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fphob87",
"fphpgv6",
"fph77zy",
"fphkkj8",
"fphtyg3",
"fphj7jk",
"fph1luq",
"fphpymf",
"fphua9r",
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"text": [
"Things that cost more money in a screen: * More pixels * Smaller pixels * Higher refresh rate * Faster response rate * Higher dynamic range When comparing a 4k TV to a 4k monitor, the only thing that really stays the same is the number of pixels. Everything else about those pixels and how they behave makes a monitor more expensive.",
"\"Smart TV's\" costs are also subsidized to an extent by the manufacturers because they can mine your data and viewing habits in order to sell them to 3rd parties...",
"Input delay/lag is a big selling point for computer monitors, Smaller and Faster costs more. Input Delay is the time between when you press a button and the action happens on the screen. Gaming monitors all aim for 1ms input delay (1/1000 of a second). Cheap TV's can have extremely bad input delay anywhere from 20 to 500ms that makes playing games annoying. edit: I confused input delay and response time. Also I own a cheap 55\" flat screen from 2011 that has a 500ms delay. I confirmed this by mirroring my pc output with a millisecond counter running on screen. I took a picture of the TV and computer monitor side by side and counted a 500milisecond difference. The TV is too old to have a \"game mode.\"",
"One thing already mentioned but not impressed upon is the higher refresh rates that are anywhere from 2-4x the refresh rate. Many movies are shot at 24 fps I believe, so lower in general and TV shows also at a lower value so there is general no need for high refresh rates on TVs. Gaming monitors on the other hand greatly benefit from hitting 120-240 hz for an extremely smooth experience. This obviously comes at a high cost when combined with a low input delay, high color accuracy, a very bright screen, along with reliability. Summary : * Lower Input Delay * Higher Refresh Rates * Retain Color Accuracy and Brightness",
"Economy of scale is a part of it. Let's say it costs $50,000.00 to make the molds for the case of the TV or monitor. EVERYBODY has a TV in their house, if not 3-4. These days probably only 20% of people are using anything beyond their laptop screen. So, let's say there are a billion TVs in the US and 200,000 computer monitors. The percentage of the total cost to manufacture the molds for a TV case is minuscule, but a much more significant percentage in a monitor. Add in bulk discounts when you're buying 100,000 circuit boards for a particular model versus 5,000, and it goes on down the line. Plus, as many have mentioned, good gaming monitors need to have higher quality electronic components.",
"Because the cost is partially subsidized by all those apps that come pre-installed on the tv that are snooping on you and tracking what you do",
"It's harder to make things smaller, particularly when you want the thing to be a tiny, transparent transistor. Monitors also tend to be very precise about pixel-by-pixel accuracy and timing, when TVs are a more general sort of thing.",
"4K means 4000 pixels from top to bottom, no matter how big or small a display screen is. Much easier to make bigger ones than to pack the same amount of pixels into a screen 1/3 the size",
"4k monitors are bought by people who want a good monitor and are willing to pay for it. Some combination of: - Gamers with high end graphics cards (who need low latency and good colours) - Graphic designers (who want good colours) - People using it for work who need the real estate (and for whom it is a business expense, and paying extra will contribute to earning more) So the most popular offerings are high quality and/or high spec products. Cheap 4k TVs are bought by people for whom price is more important than quality. High end 4k TVs are significantly more expensive than the low end.",
"Pixel density. Smaller areas with the same numbers of pixels are harder to manufacture well. Add to that the fact you're sitting a few meters away from a 60\" 4k TV, but 40cm away from a 30\" 4k monitor means theres a need for higher quality displays to make sure colours are reproduced correctly and text is legible. Also consider sales volume of 4k TVs is far higher than 4k monitors.",
"If you thinkit through, 4k TVs ARE 4K monitors that can be used at an vision-saving 6ft away! Doing it for years, for writing reports, working on complex spreadsheets, etc."
],
"score": [
3443,
1853,
736,
39,
28,
23,
13,
10,
5,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gdgs1u
|
How can films be re-released later in a higher resolution?
|
I can understand how movies can be released at higher resolutions a short time after original release, like a couple years. But I've seen some movies get released a whole decade later in \*MUCH\* higher quality than the original release. Like, how does something released in the 90's or 2000's get a 4k UltraHD release now?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fph742r",
"fph74dj",
"fph7adm",
"fphahkf"
],
"text": [
"Because they were recorded on film and film doesn't really have a resolution. Film is analog. You can always go back to the original film to get a high resolution version.",
"So, film stock, what old movie cameras used, was actually very high definition in how it recorded the action. We just didn't have the technology at the time to display it in the full resolution. So if an old movie's original film reels are still intact, they can be scanned by a computer and all of that high definition resolution can now be used.",
"Movies used to be shot on film. This was because film grains were much smaller and allowed for much better quality pictures then the pixels in a digital camera. It is only very recently that movies have started shooting digital. So most movies that have every been made have been captured in equal or better quality then modern 4K resolution movies. To release these in 4K you just need to scan the original rolls of film and do some light touch up.",
"> I've seen some movies get released a whole decade later in \\*MUCH\\* higher quality than the original release. * Here it seems you are forgetting that the actual \"original release\" for movies is in a proper theater. * Movie theaters have been using higher quality projection and sound reproduction than you could get at home *for decades*. * What's happening is that the quality of home viewing for movies is slowly catching up with movie theaters (at least in terms of visual quality). * So the original, high quality capture of the film is simply being converted to a higher quality home format that it previously was. * Yes this even includes movies shot on 35mm or 70 mm file from *decades* ago."
],
"score": [
12,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gdiffq
|
why are most screen sizes not rounded numbers?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fphhhwb",
"fphh74b",
"fphl7jo"
],
"text": [
"[Pretty much this will explain it for you. ]( URL_0 ) 15.6 it’s a diagonal, so length of the actual laptop length would be 13” instead. Same calculations are go with centimeters. And to answer why in inches: it’s because early television manufacturers wanted to make the screen size of their TVs sound more impressive. Plus due aspect ratio you couldn’t mathematically “round sizes up”.",
"Inches aren't the units for most of the planet. When you convert from the standard units to the unusual imperial units there is certain to be some rounding.",
"I recall seeing ads for computer screens that were round numbers and the size was the size of the actual monitor tube. But then there was a lawsuit. The monitor case covered part of the tubes so a 14 inch monitor might have a viewable size of 13 inches. So now monitors are listed by the viewable size or at least list the actual viewable size. I don't know if someone sued over dimensional lumber as well but now if you go to some stores you see 'actual size' listed for dimensional lumber."
],
"score": [
29,
15,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f20b3bb9c9167ee4cc14677a80f9df55"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gdjj90
|
Contact lenses VS Eyeglasses
|
How can a contact lense contain all the important layers of material to improve eyesight? Without compromising its thickness, like regular eyeglasses have. I honestly can't imagine how does a contact lense aid in poor eyesight, with such very thin material.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fphnzen"
],
"text": [
"It has to do with something called focal length. Contacts sit right on top of your eye, but glasses are several centimeters away, so the focal length for contacts is much shorter. You can prove this to yourself by using a magnifying glass held at different distances from your face."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gdk6f1
|
How do cables know that they are plugged in?
|
Recently I've been messing around with HDMI cables since I've been watching Netflix movies and TV shows on my TV that isn't smart. I have noticed that the cables can discern if they're plugged in or not. If I plug in the cable with my computer off, the TV says "No signal", and if I disconnect the cable, the TV says "Verify cable connection". How do the device knows the difference? I apologize for my poor English.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fphrpnt",
"fphrt8s",
"fphsjh0"
],
"text": [
"There is a specific wire inside the cable that is reserved for detecting whether the connectors are plugged in. Basically one half of a simple circuit is in the display and the other half is in the source device. When the two halves are connected via the cable, they output a different signal than what they do when they are separated.",
"A HDMI cable has something like 8 or 10 pairs of wires, 16 or 20 total connection points. Each one of those connection points runs a certain type of data. For example two of the pins on and HDMI cord may be to run a bit of low voltage power through to let the device know that it’s connected and ready to go",
"It's like shaking hands; if you hold out your hand to someone, you're expecting a physical connection with the other person's hand. If you're not holding his hand yet you're not \"receiving a signal\". When your hands lock, you are. Same goes for cables. The output device, like a monitor or TV expects a signal from the connector your monitor/TV is set to (AV input). As long as nothing's plugged in, it will show \"no signal\"."
],
"score": [
16,
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
gdkmb7
|
Our houses remain in shape when lived in, but once they're abandoned, why do they deteriorate so rapidly?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fphxcdn",
"fpit4qi",
"fpi5bx3",
"fpirrmv",
"fpih0es"
],
"text": [
"A house will remain in good condition if they are kept dry. When you let moisture in fungus and mold start to grow, wood rot. Water that gets in among stones will expand when it gets free and can crack them. So one option is a lot of ventilation like often is the case in a barn. Another is like the house we live in has a lot less ventilation but is kept dry by heating etc. The well-ventilated building will just need the roof to remain intact and as long as the lowe par do not start to rot they can remain intact for a very long time. A building with worse ventilation is more efficient when you like to keep it warm or cool. Some moisture will get in some way and then you start to get stuff that grows. When it results in leakage from the roof the building will deteriorate quite quickly. Another part is simple maintains where wee repair broke part of the roof, cracked windows, cleaning the gutters, etc so small damage that is simple to fix could have an enormous effect in the long run. You pain and/or clean the outside, replace the part that gets damages Another is that other humans have an effect abandoned property in simple way like leaving the door open to let in moist air and water in or by breaking a window or worse. So a simple thing like that can have a huge effect in a relatively short time.",
"Moisture is what kills abandoned houses. Without it, they can stay healthy for a long time just as this apartment did in paris, never visited for 70 years: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 )",
"Others have given good ELI5’s, but if you’re interested in a bit more reading, there was a book about 12, maybe 13 years ago called The World Without Us. It had a nice style of writing and looked at how different aspects of human culture would breakdown quite quickly, and others would last for ages (things like Bronze, plastic and huge structures like Giza and Mt Rushmore).",
"I'm not knowledgeable in this subject. However, I saw a YouTube video where a plumber mentioned that if you leave a house for even a short period of time that has cast iron plumbing, then the cast iron starts to expand and break. So yes, moisture. [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 ) (\\~7:00)",
"Moisture for sure, one of the ways that people don't think about is the temperature differential that develops between the interior and exterior of houses. Nice sunny day in the winter just above freezing, sun heats the house, house is warmer during the day. Suddenly temperature drops in the overnight, warm air still in house, condensation occurs. Rinse and repeat. Most things start small and get bigger over time when not addressed, a leaking roof gets worse not better, crumbling foundations keep crumbling. Most people don't realize how much time, manpower, sweat, and tears goes into the upkeep of our public spaces and infrastructure. EVERYTHING is constantly falling apart, except we constantly maintain it."
],
"score": [
24,
7,
7,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.boredpanda.com/70-year-untouched-apartment-paris-marthe-de-florian/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic",
"https://www.boredpanda.com/70-year-untouched-apartment-paris-marthe-de-florian/?utm\\_source=google&utm\\_medium=organic&utm\\_campaign=organic"
],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wyNvM\\_Pb\\_w",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wyNvM_Pb_w"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
gdm857
|
Why are there so few ISPs to choose from? Can't Joe from down the street start one as well?
|
Right now I'm reading Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky, and he's talking about: "The privatization of the Internet’s hardware, the rapid commercialization and concentration of Internet portals and servers and their integration into non-Internet conglomerates..." So, are there only so many physical 'servers' or portals? Could Joe not make more and then there would be... More internet to service and provide? How is it that this small group of companies has a monopoly on the ISP industry? Edit: just wanted to say thank you to everyone who commented. I apparently was missing a lot of important foundational information that I'm going to work on learning to better understand. I appreciate your time and courtesy to help me with my noobness :)
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fpi4op2",
"fpi5vty"
],
"text": [
"It's an industry that tends to be a \"natural monopoly\" in many areas: once one company has already laid out lines to everyone's house, it's not any cheaper for a second company to do the same, but the second company might not attract people to switch over (or the first company could compete on price to make the second company's efforts unprofitable).",
"Give it a try. How do you get clients? Well, you need to hook them up somehow, which is mostly by running some sort of connection into their home, and installing hardware there. So, price that out: digging up the streets of a city to lay fiber, then from there running a wire to each home, then (in flats) running cables to each flat. You'll need to do this for the connection to be available at all, even if they never become your client, because you can't leave the digging until the moment somebody signs up. So you might bring your service to 100 people and only 5 sign up. Then each client you get will need a modem of some sort, which is also pretty expensive per unit, and a tech to set it up. And on the other end you need some very fancy hardware in a datacenter with excellent conectivity, staff knowledgeable in all that high tech on call 24/7. And, you need to profit. The incumbent who already paid off their infrastructure and is making easy money is at a big advantage over you, who has to pay for all that equipment and digging."
],
"score": [
7,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
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