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hue15z | Why when film sets use CGI or Graphics, they always have a green suit or green backdrop? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually green, but not always. Because it's a color that, numerically, on an RGB or hexadecimal color scale, is the most distant, on average, from the natural colors being filmed. So then they can tell the computer to replace the color, say #00CC00 (whatever it may be) with the CGI, without risk losing the desired natural colors. If not done well, like if the glow of the screen was illuminating the person, you can make out the green lines on the edges of them. Especially noticeable in early CGI.",
"I'm not super familiar with the technology, but I'll give what I've heard from others. Basically, any color can be used, but green is the best to guarantee that nothing will be accidentally edited out. If you use other colors, the software can end up detecting those colors in skin tones depending on how the shadows fall, which would be a big problem. Bright green, on the other hand, is very unlikely to show up in unintended places."
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huf0xo | if theres no .exe in a github file, how do you run it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on the files. Some don’t run. Some only run as a mod in other programs. We would need to know the exact one to tell. Check if it has a “read me” file.",
"Compiled executables are rarely part of the source tree you see when you look at the project. There is however a releases page for the project you could check to see if they give one. It's also very common for projects to simply not provide an executable and expect each user to compile their own.",
"GitHub is a source code repository, not an executable file archive. It's up to you to provide the environment to take the source code and compile it into an executable for your system.",
"Check if there is a \"README\" file in the top folder of the GitHub files. Usually there is information there about what the project is and how it can be used. Some projects are meant to be run with specific programs, or are plugins for other programs. Some projects are just data that aren't meant to be run at all. It really depends on what sort of files you're dealing with.",
"It is generally considered a huge smooth brain move to upload compiled files into a git repository. They create merge conflicts and inconsistency. Github has a Releases page where a project can upload compiled stuff - or you'll have to compile/build it yourself."
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huim5t | How can multiple people on earth have an active GPS navigation without overloading the satellites? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"GPS is passive. You don't transmit to the satellites. You just receive time and position from multiple satellites and calculate your position from that.",
"GPS devices only receive data from the satellites, they do not beam anything back up. As such they do not place any load on the satellites. This also has the advantage the GPS chips can be very low power.",
"How can millions of people listen to a TV or radio broadcast without overloading the transmitter? The answer is that they just send out a signal that covers a huge area and the one they listen to is just revise the signal. GPS is the same they just transmit a signal. What they send all the time is a signal that says the clock is X and slowly sends a signal that contains their orbit. The clock on all GPS satellites are synced and extremely accurate. Radio signals take time to travel to you just like sound but a lot faster. The result is that if you receive a signal from 4 satellites you determine the distance to them get a location in 3D space with only 3 you can estimate it as if you were at sea level. The positioning is done with circles. Take a paper mark the location of 2 satellites and a receiver, put them in the shape of a triangle. Measure the distance to each satellite from the receiver and draw a circle around it with that radius. If you do that with 2 satellites the circles will intersect in 2 points add a third satellite and you get a single intersection point for all. This is how GPS determines your location. The harder part is getting the distance because you need a very accurate time measurement of a signal. For 2 satellites you used the earth at sea level for a third circle to determine in which of the two-point you are at. There will be some error in this but not a lot. & #x200B; The reason you need 3 satellites and not 2 like the circles indicate for a 2D lock is that you do not measure the distance to the satellite because you do not have an extremely accurate clock. What you get is a difference in distance that results in one more satellite need then you expect."
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hujhsh | I understand that the Lockheed SR-71 can fly very fast and high, but how did it actually spy on other countries? I assume there is more to it than simply flying over a country | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It had a big camera on board that could be used to photograph troop movements, military installations and so on. Potentially they also had electronic intelligence measures on board, though I don't believe any details of this have been made public.",
"It had several payload bays for various different sensor systems. This was operated by the RSO in the back seat while the pilot was responsible for flying. The sensors differed for each mission and evolved over time. This was very secret and even the RSO did not know the details of each payload, just enough to operate it. There were often cameras on board taking images down or to the side, the advantage of an aiplane over a satellite was that it could take video of an area which showed activity that helped find out what they were doing. They could also carry infrared cameras which could help find hidden objects and help classify them. One of the most popular sensor they used was a radar that would record detailed video of an area, the radar had a much further range then an optical camera. In addition the SR-71 could carry radio listening equipment allowing the CIA to intercept local radio traffic. This allowed them to record any short range communications from the ground but also create fingerprints of the radar systems and triangulate them to find their position. The SR-71 was also used to intice the enemy to fire missiles at it so that its radar scanning pattern could be recorded and detectors and jammers could be developed. This meant that lower and slower aircraft would also be able to avoid the missiles when needed. And lastly the SR-71 was used to signal to anyone nearby that the US was watching. A lot of missions had the primary purpuse of making everyone on the ground hear a sonic boom as a warning.",
"It's harder to detect things that fly very high or very fast. So strap a crazy good camera onto a very high, very fast plane, and you got yourself a good spy plane. I'm sure that they also used some radar interference and other tech to make it even harder to detect, but that's above my pay grade.",
"The primary idea is that it is very hard to shoot down or at least was back when it was buid. SAM(surface to ground missiles) have a limited amount of fuel so there is in principle sphere around the engage where it can engage a target. It takes time for a missile to reach maximum altitude so you need to detect it when it is far enough to oust so if you launch a missile it can reach the altitude of it at the moment it fly there. The predecessor the U-2 that was first flown in 1955 that operated at around 24000 meters and was flying at Mach 0.75 was immune to SAM until one was shot down in 1960s. The missiles simply did not have enough fuel to reach that altitude. SR-71 operated at mach 3.3 at 25000 meters. SR-71 and the CIA predecessor the A-12 was build to have a relatively small radars cross-section so it was not easy to detect. Radar system and surface to air missiles back in the 1960-70s was not as today so you did not like them together in a large network with computers and could use different radars to track and to fire the missiles to engage a target. The result was when it was used most of the time when a radar could pick it up it was too late to launch a missile because it would have passed you before a missile would reach that altitude. But with system developers of radar and missile overflight with an SR-71 for example Russia today would be very risky. There is no official acknowledgment that SR-71 ever have flown over the Soviet Union as the U-2 and other spy plain did befoe it. It did fly along the border and speed from there. It might have done overflight but there is no public information. It would be the Soviet Union that had the best SAM and radars that could shoot it down. It might have been the case that is never happened as it was to risky and at the time there was spy satellites that could do the same job so it was not needed the same way. The SR-71 has been used over Vietnam, China, and Laos. There have been flights over middle eastern countries too and like in other locations around the world. A-12 did a few flight over North Korea a few times. So SR-71 has been used outside the national border or over countries that did not have SAM system that could engage in. SAM is not the only way to shoot down in and fighter jets is an alternative but they have a problem reaching the required altitudes for a radar lock and for the missile to reach it. Swedish JA 37 Viggen interceptor did manage to get a radar lock on it may times because there it used the same thin stretch of international air space between the island of Öland and Gotland on the return home after flying along the Soviet border. So it was picked up early by land-based radar when it approved the soviet cost and you launch the interceptors that could reach the point that you knew it would use. You accelerated to high speed and the flew up in a parabolic arch and if you timed it correctly you could intercept it in the air. It was just radar lock as training and to show the US what they could do. The aircraft was over international airspace. It would not work that way if it flew over a country to spy on it because you would not use a predictable path so fighter jets could be placed in the perfect spot to get a radar lock. So it primarily worked on the idea that no missile system would detect early enough to reach it or that it could reach that altitude."
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hujkvi | For PlayStation 2, how did cheat codes from another disc get transferred to the designated game disc? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bit of background information: Discs are a type of long-term storage. They're also read-only. When you play a game, nothing is written on the disc itself. That includes cheat codes, save data or anything of that sort. The way Action Replay codes work is simple: They change specific values in the console's memory to correspond to whatever you want to do in the game. For example, Infinite Money on FF7 is 8009D260 000F. That basically means that the value at address 0x8009D260, which is where the money counter is stored, needs to be set to FFFF, which will max it out to 65,535 Gil. You can do all sorts of things simply by modifying memory values: Infinite health/money, get new items by writing them to your inventory block, and so on. Old Action Replays used to plug directly into the console and modify those values as you play. However, when you use an Action Replay code from a disc on PS2, software will be loaded onto your console that will take care of setting those values for you. As you never reset your console during the disc swap, the values you've selected will still be on your console's memory when the game loads itself up. If you ever turn off your console, the console's RAM will be reset and you will need to use your Action Replay disc again.",
"It loaded the cheat codes from the action replay disc into memory and kept it there while you changed discs. The game would also load in memory alongside the cheat codes."
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hulx9o | Why do some countries on maps appear much smaller/bigger than they truly are? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The earth is a sphere, and maps are flat. That means that you can't draw the curved surface of the earth on a flat map without something getting distorted. There are various maps that preserve various properties - angles, distances and so on, but you never can have a projection that preserves everything. So, on most maps some countries look bigger than they are and others smaller. There is a special map projection called the equal area projection, which does preserve the relative size of countries.but that comes with the disadvantage that it distorts their shape and angles in general.",
"Because a map is flat and the globe is round. There’s no way to proportional draw a globe on a flat rectangular surface. The further towards the poles you get on a rectangular map the more distorted the soE differential becomes."
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huolcc | How does my phone camera recognize when it’s looking at a QR code? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A QR code looks like [this]( URL_0 ). The three square blocks in the corners, as well as the little block in the lower right, are what tells the software \"Yes, this is a QR code!\" Then, it scans the rest of the image to determine more about the code's structure, and eventually interpret it."
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hury4c | How can cheating can be detected in an online game of chess? | I did a search of this question, but there was only one post with a vague response | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Every chess site has a number of cheat detection variables, and they keep their methods largely secret. But by analyzing lots of variables like the frequency of picking top-level moves, the speed of play in complicated situations, consistency of move times (as opposed to making some moves instantly, and puzzling over other moves for a longer time), and consistently picking the best move even over other more likely moves of similar strength, or a marked increase in play partway through a game (as lots of cheaters will play normally, then switch on an engine as soon as they think they're losing) chess sites can get a pretty clear idea of if someone is using a chess engine. Even the best players in the world, who will pick so-called \"computer moves\" in a lot of situations because they’re crazy good at the game, play differently than the way that a computer will play. For example, a top-level Grandmaster will sometimes decide against a move that is good in theory, but opens the door to lots of difficult choices in the future moves, especially if they're running out of time on their clock - at least, provided there's another option that appears similarly strong but easier to play. A computer engine doesn't mind the sharpest positions, because it's not concerned about making a small mistake and losing a good position, so it'll always pick the theoretical \"best\" move (according to the engine's methods) without care over which positions are more or less sharp. Humans might pick one choice or the other in certain situations, but computers will always pick the best.",
"I've watched Grandmaster Ben Finegold play repeated 5 minute chess games on youtube and he can sniff a cheat. He knows from study and instinct what \"the computer move\" is. In other words the ideal move in any particular situation. If a player is playing exactly like a computer would they there's a very good chance they are cheating."
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huwj25 | what are the effects of raising/lowering CPU frequencies and voltages? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Higher frequencies mean faster of course. But if you go too high frequency the transistors inside can't switch fully on or off fast enough and you get errors. Like if you ask your cpu to add 5+5 it might spit out 1034. Higher voltages let the transistors switch faster (so your max frequency without errors goes up) but waste more energy as heat. If you can't cool the CPU enough it basically cooks itself. Also higher voltages along with higher heat tend to break down the actual silicon that makes up the CPU faster so the overall life of the CPU gets shorter. Lower frequencies reduce power use (and heat). You can slow down a CPU pretty much as much as you want if you can stand the slow speed. Lower voltages save power and heat as well, but too low and you get errors again as the transistors can't turn fully on."
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huztn7 | The difference between 1080p, 1440p, 4k, etc... like is something putting out 4k but shown on a 1080p monitor gonna look the same as something being put out at 1080p on the same monitor? | I understood the number references the pixel count but what makes more pixels = a better pixel? And to my understanding, 4k takes two to tango.. like your system/movie/etc has to put out or support 4k resolution while your tv or monitor or whatever has to be 4k as well. So is there any benefit to having a 4k game on a 1080p display? Conversely, will a 1080p game look better on a 4k TV vs a 1080p tv? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A 4k image on a 1080p screen will usually look better than a 1080p image on a 1080p screen. This is due to the 4k image having used more pixel data to preserve the original image in a less compressed manner. \"Down sampling\" the 4k image to 1080p means turning each set of 4 pixels in a square into 1 pixel in the resulting 1080p image. The result of this operation will produce a better picture than if the source material had been saved at 1080p to start with, this is due to image compression. When you compress an image you kind of squish the colors and shapes a bit to fit in nice neat patterns, this results in a blurrier image that is less accurate but saves greatly on data. A compressed 4k image still has far more image information than a compressed 1080p image, and as a result down sampling the compressed 4k image to 1080p will look much nicer than plain compressed 1080p.",
"So when there’s a mismatch between the video or picture, and the screen’s picture, your computer/device will scale up or down that image to fit. Some methods of doing that work well, and sometimes they don’t. For example, take a 1080 video played on a 4K (4 times as many pixels). Your device may just take one pixel of video and display it on 4 device pixels. Or for each device pixel, it could take the ‘average’ of the video pixels around it; implemented well it can look a bit better than the 1080 video on a 1080 monitor. But poorly implemented it’ll just make everything look fuzzy. The inverse is also true, a 4K video played on a 1080 screen could just take the average of 4 pixels, and play it on one, or it could average them out. Depending, itll look like a normal 1080 video, it might look better, or it might look worse. It all depends on what algorithm they use to do the scaling.",
"Video files behave different to 3D games: Video files are saved at a set resolution and compressed to a set file size. The file size matters a lot to how good a video looks - all other things being equal a 1080p video with a larger file size should look better than a 4k video with a smaller file size. Now because 4k videos have a lot more pixels they are generally made to have bigger file sizes so they look really nice on 4k screens, so of course when downsized to display on a 1080p screen they would look better than the smaller file size 1080p version of that video. 3D games on the other hand don't work like that, rather than have a set resolution the 3D graphics are drawn in real time into the screen resolution, so there isn't really a 4k or 1080p version of a game, it just draws the graphics at whatever resolution your screen is set to (720p/1080p/4k). Now there are a few additional cases, for example some consoles and PCs aren't fast enough to draw all those graphics at 4k so have to set the screen to display 1080p or less even if it's a 4k screen, and games may also include higher res textures that add extra details on 4k screens that are too small to see on 1080p screens.",
"Video editor here....! 4k footage has lots of advantages when zooming in or animating the frames. So if you shoot a 4k video and edit it on a 1080 timeline you have almost 4 times the amount of space to zoom in and out without losing resolution."
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hv0umn | Why should I worry about my data being exposed? | Say I was in a major data leak. My name, address, email address, picture, and browser history are now public information Why should I be worried about that? I’d understand if my password or phone number leaked, since then people could pose as me But if it was public knowledge exactly who I am, what is my danger? I’m asking this because I bought johnsmith.xyz, (but replace John Smith with my name) but just realized that I probably shouldn’t share that with anyone online and should instead buy qlzx.xyz or something | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's simple, you expose yourself to all kinds of fraud. There are a boatload of services out there that you could be using that would be satisfied with that kind of information to believe that something is really coming from you. What's to stop anyone with that info to ring up Netflix or Amazon customer support, pose as you, ask them to change the password after pretending they've forgotten it, and shop in your stead using your own credit card? This is just an example, there are so many more uses to personal information."
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hv0z9z | What happens to deleted files once you get rid of them on a pc, where do they go? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’re still on there just your computer “removes” access to them and flags that space to be freely written over.",
"Information on your computer is stored as a chain of ones and zeroes. When you delete a file, the OS will simply go to the beginning of the file and mark it as deleted. It will not physically zero every bit of the file as that takes too long to do and causes unnecessary drive wear. Think of it as covering a word with a correction pen in text. You can still read what's underneath if you scratch the fluid away, but your computer will know that the file is deleted and will treat it as such. That space is free for anything to be written on top. However, once something is written on top of the previous file, the bits are permanently lost and the file will most likely be unrecoverable.",
"Think of a completely fresh hard drive as empty plots of land all with vacant signs. The files and programs are houses and other structures that get built on those lots and the vacant signs are removed. When you delete a file, nothing happens to the actual buildings. The only change is that a vacant sign gets placed on the lot. New houses and structures can be built on the now usable plot of land, even if it partially demolishes whatever was there. It's possible to try and recover what type of structure the house was before the vacant sign was placed only if the structure is intact and not built over."
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hv30rv | why cookie consent message are always generic like "we use cookies to provide you the best experience" as opposed to giving a short summary of what the site really uses them for | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"because they DONT want you to know how many shady companies they sell your data to. those banners are because some people in the EU meant well but had little technical understanding when they made it a law there (and since then many other countries have followed suit, making it so website owners just do them for everyone). but the owners of the site you're visiting know that you dont want to give your data to 200+ barely legal firms somewhere where no one is enforcing privacy laws... so some make it as difficult as they can to \"opt out\" of that. it has to be said however that some sites also do really simple \"only use the cookies you require for this site\" options with just a few clicks... but the whole issue is that instead of limiting what data they can collect and who they can sell it to, the law just says they need to tell you and let you opt out",
"that's just always how corporations talk. it's easier to say \"we do it because it's good for you, valued customer\" than to be specific and complicated. telling people what cookies actually do could make some people flip out even if it's nothing truly bad, too, companies don't believe that most people are as inquisitive as you."
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hv42rd | how does a needle scratching the surface of a vinyl disc produce music? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The needle isn't scratching, it's riding in a groove cut into the vinyl, getting thrown back and forth due to its shape. That's how sound is encoded onto the disk.",
"The grove causes it to vibrate. Sound is vibrations. The vibrations are amplified mechanically or electronically."
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hv7562 | How do forms of alternative computing such as DNA and molecular computers work? | & #x200B; [ URL_0 ]( URL_2 ) [ URL_1 .]( URL_3 .) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All computers are something called a Turing Machine. You can look up the specific definition here - URL_0 But a tl;dr of it is, every computer consists of 3 things: 1. Something to store data 2. Something to manipulate the stored data 3. Set of rules that work with that data The third one is just a set of logical rules. For example, if you are presented with two things, lets say a blob of blue paint and a blob of yellow paint. The rule may say, combine them and drop a blob of green paint somewhere. This is in essence what a binary computer does, present it with a 1 and a 0, output 10 somewhere. In a typical binary computer, #1 is something like your RAM or your hard drive. #2 is your CPU. #3 is in the arrangement of transistors in your CPU. For a DNA computer, #1 is the DNA, #2 is in the arrangement of the DNA sequence, #3 use DNA and proteins to stitch patterns together. It should be noted that DNA computers are painfully slow (days to do something a normal computer would spend seconds on) and error prone, it's still a field in its infancy. We also haven't developed a general purpose computer using DNA yet (Called a Universal Turing Machine). Your alarm clock is a Turing Machine, but it can't do stuff that your PC and phone can. Your PC and phone are Universal Turing Machines because they can do anything any other Turing Machine can do, such as act as an alarm clock."
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hv8phn | - Why aren't the any pictures from rovers of the huge martian landmarks? I understand that Olympus Mons would be quite hard to take a picture of from the surface, but what about Valles Marineris ? | there * sorry lol | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're sent with specific missions, such as taking samples of soil to see if life is viable or every existed on Mars. They're sent to whatever location best suits their mission, and we haven't sent a mission for sightseeing yet.",
"Why can't you photograph the Grand canyon from New York city? Basically you have to be near the right place and with a good view of it to take a picture of it.",
"So far people have only put down 4 functional rovers on Mars (There was a soviet one on a lander that failed a few seconds after landing), and as others have noted, they haven't really traveled far. But why not drop one on Valles Marineris in the first place? I mean, it would be a sweet place to get some images and surely you could do all sorts of interesting geology looking at those cliff walls. And why are lander images generally lacking in any landscape more scenic than some rolling hills and the occasional crater rim? The reason is that landing rovers on Mars is a pretty tricky business, and rovers are really expensive. So NASA needs a nice flat spot to put them down to ensure they make a nice landing instead of smashing into a boulder or cliff wall or whatever. So they tend to land rovers in relatively safe locations, far from the really scenic views. Also, it's not terribly easy to roll around on wheels in really rough terrain, so flatter areas make it easier for the rovers to navigate. Which is a shame because I'd really like to see some of those panoramic images from the canyons and volcanoes and cliffs, but I'm going to have to wait on it. Launches are getting cheaper and rovers are getting better, so the odds of an ambitious launch to go someplace like that are better in the future.",
"That's not where the rovers are. It's like asking why you can't take a picture of Mount Everest from Belgium."
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hvcmid | A lot of outrage comes from “companies stealing our data”, what is an actual harmful outcome to me from a company taking my data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, they can target their advertising very specifically, manipulating your behaviour by knowing how to subconsciously alter your spending habits. The data can be used to alter things like your chances of being approved for a loan, or how much your insurance will cost. They might reveal information you'd rather keep secret, for example gay people have been outed because their social media began sending adverts and messages related to that based off of their search history... there can be a lot of consequences.",
"Imagine prospective employers being able to buy a health report about you before deciding whether to call you to interviews. Or insurance industry denying coverage for things you may not even be aware of.",
"The ultimate dxstopia is, that you become what the algorithms thinks you are, because everxthing on the net is specifically tailored to what the alg thinks, you are.",
"In this age of evolving technology and facial recognition/tracking, even your face can be superimposed in pictures and video. Right now, they’re being called “deep fakes” — Imagine being accused of a crime you know you didn’t commit, or being “caught” on video somewhere you know you weren’t, because your face was digitally added somewhere or to something. Odds are fairly slim, but it’s not impossible.",
"There’s an argument that it’s being collected in deceptive ways, that the data is your property and therefor it’s theft.",
"You only get ads for expensive insurance and impotence pills because they know you smoke, have diabetes and a DUI.",
"It depends on what you value. It’s easy feel harmed when someone steals your money, property, partner etc because we all value those things. But if don’t value your privacy/identity, when it is stolen you won’t feel harmed. But as others have said, your stolen data in the wrong hands can be used against you, and that will cause you harm whether you value it or not.",
"One very real issue that I don't not see here is stalking and abusers. If you are a victim of domestic abuse, you can't escape your abuser because so much of your date is available for sale. There was at least one case where an abuser paid a date collections agency for his ex's address, then went and killed her. This a very real problem. You can disappear even when your life literally depends on it.",
"I suppose the question is how harmful is it that everything you do online is known by various companies, and they sell that information (which sites you visit, any information about yourself you've ever written into a social media profile, any purchases you've made, etc) to anyone willing to pay them. Maybe it doesn't seem harmful to you, but the outrage and discomfort are pretty understandable. Imagine the real-world analogy of a bunch of people keeping an eye on you over the course of the day (tracking your movements through town, recording what you say, writing down which stores you go into and which books you purchase, etc) and trying to sell that information to anyone who wants to know. It's more broad-reaching then you might think. Ever wonder how websites that never ask you for your age or gender can tell advertisers what percentage of the views on their site come from men between the ages of 18 and 25 (or any similar information)? It's because they know what IP address you're accessing their server from, and they bought the age and gender information for that IP address from Facebook, or Youtube, or someone else who did ask.",
"In addition to the other comments here, these companies have essentially made a product out of each individual that uses their service or services. And they sell that product to make money off of it. So really it at least partly depends on whether or not you think you're getting a fair price for the data these companies collect from you. Is it worth a free email service in exchange for the data about your banking, health, spending, demographic, and personal information up to and including where you go every day? Maybe to some but not to others. Everything about you leaves a digital fingerprint. Only, your digital fingerprint doesn't actually belong to you. And in some cases (most cases) you do not have control over where those fingerprints end up. It encompasses where you live, work, spend time, what you spend time doing, what you eat, when you sleep, how you shop, what you own, who your friends are, what your interests are, what your social, economic and political opinions are etc. And that data can be culminated to make judgements about you. Those judgements are a lot of what people are worried about. That and whether or not it's fair to monetize you in a way that you can't really monetize yourself. The average person cannot make money off their digital fingerprint.",
"One example that has harmed you personally? During the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a company called Cambridge Analytica gave improperly harvested data of tens of millions of people to agents of an adversarial government who interfered in the election. Since their candidate won, you have probably been harmed in several ways from healthcare to the environment, and most significantly by the destabilization of democratic institutions and a wholesale looting of federal coffers. Edit: I should say, unless you are a millionaire or billionaire; in that case you're probably fine."
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hvd4dz | Why is URL_0 considered as a reliable source of myth debunking? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All of their reasoning and evidence is laid out with references. Anything they say can be independently verified by third parties. With the ability to independently validate them, if they weren't reliable, they would have become defunct by now.",
"it's got a reputation for being rigorous and responsible, and they show their work and have done so for a long time. every source thought of as reliable has built up its reputation over time by not fucking up massively. doesn't mean I agree with their conclusions all the time, but that's why theyre broadly trusted.",
"Because they do the work to make sure what they publish is accurate and un-biased. Their methodology statements are [here]( URL_0 ).",
"It's not. Snopes uses half truths and half lies and use the gasslight tactic to deny anything that is against their agenda. They ignore the big scene and just focus on what this convenient. It's sickening. Snopes can't the considered serious investigative journalism. More likely they are sponsored by a group so they keep going"
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hveatu | how does a solid state drive fail? | I can understand how a hard drive can fail because it has mechanical parts that wear down over time, but everything is electric with no moving parts in a solid state drive. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Flash memory works by storing electric charge on tiny plates surrounded on all sides by insulation. These plates are not connected to the rest of the circuit, so they keep their charge for a long time. To program the memory, a strong voltage is applied, which causes electric charge to \"tunnel\" (make a quantum jump) across the insulator and onto the plate. However, the strong voltage needed to cause tunneling also damages the insulation around the plates. If the same memory location is reprogrammed too many times, the insulation will wear out and it won't work anymore."
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hvg786 | How Is Google's AMP NOT Massive Copyright Violation? | The way I understand AMP, Google takes someones site, copies it over to their own servers, converts it somehow and then redistributes that site from Google's AMP servers. To me this is a text book perfect case of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not unauthorized. But it is insanely consumer unfriendly. Google prioritizes amp websites in search results, so websites are incentivized to support it.",
"It’s an open-source framework that websites opt into. This means that they’re not going to have AMP pages unless they explicitly want to. To enable AMP, it needs to be included in the source code of a webpage. This means that AMP has to be approved and included by the developer, which negates any copyright claims - you can’t really claim copyright when you were directly and intentionally involved in that avenue of distribution. There are issues with it though - namely Google uses it to exert their control over the internet, it allows less legitimate/safe websites to appear more trustworthy, and it produces less monetization for websites that utilize it."
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hvkcm9 | If a hacker successfully breaches a business or government system, but doesn't change anything, how are breaches typically detected after the fact? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because in most systems, everything you do is logged in some way....so if someone accesses the system and doesn't delete the logs that showed they accessed it (while also preventing the system from making new logs), details of their access (time and date, account utilized, assuming remotely accessed a system name and/or remote IP address, stuff like that) remains on the system. Effectively in a properly configured system the moment they even attempt to access it, security personnel can find trace details that showed they attempted to (or successfully) accessed it.",
"network logs are always being recorded, even if you don't change anything on a particular server system. network logs are generated by the network device, not a service endpoint where system functionality or filedata is stored.",
"There are often what are known as Indicators of Compromise (IOCs). You may be able to find evidence of a particular user clicking on a phishing link by examining web traffic logs, and then interview the user to find out if they entered their credentials on the phishing site. You might also be able to identify if that users account was used to access systems from an unexpected location, e.g., if your business is in the US but you see that users account being used from a Chinese IP address."
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hvkl25 | How do planes slow down before landing, meaning how do they go from 400 knots 25 mins from landing to 140 knots when landing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"while in cruise the engine is constantly fighting aerodynamic drag. turn engine partially off and the plane naturally slows down. same as if you lift your foot off gas pedal on a car. at lower speeds, the plane's wings do not generate as good lift, so pilots deploy flaps, which increase lift and responsiveness but add on even more drag, slowing the plane down even more.",
"They slow their engines down. This reduces lift over the wings and the air resistance naturally slows the plane down. Toward the end of the approach modern jets extend flaps to make the wings larger, increasing both lift and manuverability at the reduced speed of the landing approach.",
"When airplanes slow their wings have a point at which the shape of them does not create sufficient lift. During approach and landing pilots will extend flaps to make the wings larger than normal flight. This creates a larger pressure difference and allows the plane to slow even more. Without the flaps the landing speed of a typical airliner would be 200kts. With flaps we’re able to get it slower 140-150kts. Prior to extending flaps to slow down we reduce power from the engines and use pitch to control speed. As we slow down we have to gradually pitch up more and when we pitch up this causes more drag on the plane to slow it down. For the ELI5 - pull the power - pitch up to slow - make wings bigger to continue to slow - land on runway."
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hvnddg | Why DOES the camera add 10lbs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Could be the lens warping the light, often called the fisheye effect. Could just be people making up excuses for the picture being worse than expected. Some might mean it as a joke.",
"Take a look at this: URL_0 The gif shows the effect of different lens focal lengths, and the effect they have on your face. Look at the difference between 20mm and 200mm. The human eyes focal length is roughly 22mm. Cameras focal lengths are generally larger."
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hvns35 | How does the landing of rocket determined at the exact position and exact time? | In rocket science, it's really fascinating that scientists do the accurate calculations of where to land the rocket. How does that work actually? How do they figure out that a rocket will land at this place and at that time. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well. Maybe not is the explanation that you are finding, but, the scientist do a lot of calculations. They take account the rotation of the earth, Coriolis effect, temperature, pressure, the velocity of the air, the gravity of the earth, if is so high, the interaction with sun's and moon's gravity, the design of the rocket, the friction agains the air, the weight of the rocket, the fuel expense. All finely synchronized with atomic clocks and other things that I don't remember. If you want we can deep in the theme."
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hvp6am | The difference between AM and FM on radio? | Hello, Can anyone please explain to me the difference between AM and FM on radio? I have tried looking into it but I get very confused. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"AM is Amplitude Modulation and FM is Frequency modulation. Essentially these are differences in the way the radio wave travels. FM has better signal but poorer range, AM has better range but poorer signal. If you're driving across country or out in the sticks, you're better off trying to listen or transmit on AM. In the city however, FM will be better.",
"If you want to transmit information via radio waves, you have a few options, 2 of which are called AM (Amplitude Modulation) and FM (Frequency Modulation). With AM you vary the intensity (\"loudness\") of the signal you send out, proportional to the signal you want to send. With FM you slightly vary the carrier frequency, shifting it in sync with the signal you want to send. And since the signal strength can be influenced by the environment (humidity, lightning, even buildings), but the frequency usually isn't, FM can provide a much clearer signal compared to AM.",
"The essense of radio broadcasting is to take sound (which are pressure waves within a certain range of frequencies) converting it into electrical signals sending it (broadcasting) over long distances and then having a radio receiver convert the electrical signal back to sound. In order to do this efficiently and to allow different radio \"channels\", the sound signal is \"piggy backed\" on a higher frequency electrical signal before transmission. The radio receiver \"recovers\" the sound frequencies from this piggy backed signal before amplifying it and sending it to a speaker. This \"piggy backing\" of one signal on another is called modulation. AM (amplitude modulation) and FM (frequency modulation) are two different methods to achieve this. AM is generally the simpler method of doing so but usually has poorer sound quality while FM has better sound quality but is slightly more complicated. (By modern electronics standards, both are actually very simple but AM/FM were designed in the early days of electronics when components were more expensive and lower quality) This is about as ELI5 as it can get - anything further requires some diagrams and understanding some basic electricity principles. And anything deeper than that requires some mathematics (using complex numbers) to explain basic signal processing theories.",
"At a 5 year old level, FM is talking faster, AM is talking louder. clearer signals usually with FM, AM can travel farther. Either way you get the message because your brain filters out the volume or speed for comprehension. Radio can be hard to grasp because there is nothing native for comparison. We are mixing two waves to get a third wave. if we know one of the waves we can subtract it to get the original waves back. We have a Signal (data,message,voice, etc.) and a Carrier wave (frequency) and equipment that can do the addition and subtraction. We can take one wave that can travel pretty far(carrier), and mess with it (modulation) to have another wave (signal) piggyback on it. the new third wave looks coarse and gross compared to the carrier wave. BUT if you filter the original carrier wave out by subtracting the carrier wave you get your signal wave. All done by measuring changes with equipment at that frequency. Now do we speed up and slow down the frequency to denote changes, or do we increase the power and decrease the transmit power. Those changes are the addition of the signal wave. and the changes are TINY! nothing perceptible to humans, but the circuits we design can filter out the common carrier wave and get the signal wave back. This is why radios have (had?) dials. You were (are?) tuning the frequency and literally listening to the difference from the baseline frequency you are tuned ( and tuning out). but you first have to tell it which changes (how you get your signal wave back) you are trying to keep, the transmit levels outside of the normal on that frequency , or the frequency itself speeding up and slowing down. FM The tuner is eating every thing that cycles on that exact frequency, whatever isn't exact is sent to the speakers. & #x200B; AM or the tuner is listening to one set frequency and eats everything at the normal transmit levels and sending everything else to the speakers. & #x200B; again these variations are VERY tiny. Nothing us stupid humans can detect. For a quick primer on frequency: blink your eyes once per second. (hopefully you didn't start doing that, cause you have to read this.) If I change cue cards in front of you every half second. you'll miss the one of the cards. If I have another person close their eyes when you opened them. I can transmit two messages in the same space. But you will still each get your own messages. If you change your frequency of your eye blinks to match the other persons you can see their message, but not yours anymore. This is how the oscillators are capturing data. You have to be tuned to their oscillation for the correct timing. so you both read the same thing."
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hvpmz0 | How do games like Call of Duty Mobile keep track of where everyone is and what they are doing so quickly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's really not that much data being send. Player coordinates are just 3 numbers, so even 100 players positions are barely scratching a kilobyte of data. If you shoot there is just an event sent to the server that a player used weapon X from their position firing in angle a,b so again a pretty reasonable amount of data. Other stuff is stored locally (your ammo, terrain) and only occasionally checked if your stats are still in sync with the server. The actual graphics are generated by your GPU from just position data, and known models that are also stored on your computer (guess why modern games are so huge on your disc)"
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hvrctv | Why is it faster to manually restart (shut down a computer and turn it back on) than restart using the power options on a computer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you simply hold the power button down it the same as holding a pillow over someone's face until they stop breathing. Very quick. If you decide to slowly restart it by using the menu options it, stops all the task running on the machines and this can take a while of some programs are mid process. This can be compared to slowly poisoning your spouse over the course of a month with let's say mmmm anti-freeze. Did this help?",
"the reason is that when you use \"shutdown\" it doesn't actually end all services/programs but writes a general system settings file on your harddisk which it then loads if you boot it up again. if you use \"restart\" it actually ends all running services and performs a clean startup. this is why this kind of reboot is recommended when you do bigger changes to core settings of your computer. the reason it behaves this way when you use \"shutdown\" is an option called \"fast startup\" which is enabled by default.",
"The operating system's restart option will execute a series of \"housekeeping\" actions to make sure you don't lose any data, corrupt files, or encounter problems before it actually triggers a restart. This sequence is telling the software (operating system) to act on the hardware. The physical restart button on the case interrupts an electrical circuit on the motherboard that triggers an immediate restart at the hardware level, bypassing the software entirely. Doing this can result in data loss/corruption, but most operating systems these days are much better at passively preventing that than they used to be. Basically it's like the difference between doing your nightly routine before going to sleep and getting knocked out.",
"Are you talking about the difference between pressing \"Restart\" or pressing \"Shutdown\" on a Windows system? By default, there is a system called \"Fast Startup\" that's activated whenever you press \"Shutdown\" but it's disabled for \"Restarts\". Basically the difference is that after closing all the programs, the operating system doesn't fully close itself but saves its current state and goes into sort of hibernation mode from where it's faster to pick up when you turn your computer back on. That's when you select \"Shutdown\". For a \"Restart\", the operating system closes itself completely so after the reboot it needs to gather pieces of itself from a variety of places, which on some machines takes quite a bit longer than recovering with fast startup. Sometimes a restart with no fast startup is needed for the system to do updates etc. For more details, check [this article]( URL_0 ). I have a dual-boot Windows 8 / Ubuntu on my computer. Whenever I need to change from Windows to Ubuntu, I purposefully shut down and then start with the power button because it's significantly faster tp boot up the next time I want to use Windows.",
"Crashing a car into a brick wall is quicker than using the brakes, but it isn't the recommended method of stopping.",
"Explain Like You're Five: Turning off the computer from the Power Options gives the computer an opportunity to close all the programs properly to prevent data loss and leave the system in a proper state when it turns back on. Turning off the computer manually is immediate, no time for the computer to properly shut down programs and is an on-demand shutdown at your discretion, not the willingness of the computer. In the event this provides a follow up question, Yes, it is always better to shut down through the power options when you're able to. It's better for the computer files and good practice to follow.",
"Think of it like getting ready for bed. The computer needs time to put its documents away, make notes for itself for the morning, and make sure nothing was left running before it can safely turn off, just like we put away our tools, clean up the kitchen, and brush our teeth before we go to bed. Holding the power button is to the computer like someone hitting you over the head with a pan--you're gonna fall asleep quicker, but you'll wake up with a huge mess to deal with, you might have ruined something important when you fell down, and your head might not work right afterward.",
"Computers are like you and I - they have a 'thinking brain' that has what they are thinking about right now. But unlike you and I, they can't actually remember anything without writing it down. So computers have a big 'book' called a hard drive. When you shut down a computer using the power options, it has a chance to 'write down' all the things it needs to remember in its 'book'. When you just turn the power off, the computer doesn't get a chance to write anything down and so it is now forgotten forever. It takes longer because the computer goes through each program running, saving the necessary data to its hard disk for retrieval later."
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hvsi58 | Why are movies at 24 FPS if our eye can differentiate between 24, 30, 60 or more FPS? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"24 frame per second is by now a tradition that is about a century old. 30 and 60 and 25 and 50 frames per second came later with TV as TVs ran on main electricity at 50Hz or 60Hz and that made things easier to deal with. 24 frames per second is fast enough for our eyes to see it as a moving picture rather than a quick series of still images. Back in the day a century ago when this was standardized and everyone still shot on actual film reels, using 30 fps instead of 24 fps would have meant making the film reel 25% longer and using 25% more of the then still somewhat expensive material used to make films. 24 fps was good enough.",
"In the past, movies were recorded on physical film. This film was expensive to make and develop, so filmmakers cut corners by using a lower framerate. 24 fps was seen as the lowest framerate that still looked smooth enough to see a moving image.",
"Because of the technological limitations of film cameras and film projectors. Having a higher frame rate meant that you need to produce more film, film it faster and project it faster. 24 fps is around the minimum frame rate that makes the motions not appear jerky, so it was chosen as a compromise. By now we've gotten used to 24 fps, even when the technology advanced beyond it."
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hvuvxq | How is that there are PCs more powerful than a console and yet, people are unable to run emulators properly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are tree reasons why emulators are hard: * The instruction set of the console can be different. In this case the host machine simply doesn't understand instruction for the emulated console. This means that the target machine has to be powerful enough to translate *and run* the emulated software. Modern consoles use the same instruction set as modern PCs (x64), so it's not a problem anymore, except for the Switch. * Modern consoles are locked down in software and hardware. Console makers and game devs often don't want games to be easily emulated so they try to make it hard to run games on anything but the console. * Consoles have a slightly different architecture/capabilities than PCs^[1]. This is a **huge** problem when emulating, because the emulation system needs to detect that the emulated software is doing something that won't work on the host machine and find *some way* to make it work. This can be *enormously* expensive depending on what the missing capabilities are. ****** **[1]** For example: all currently available and planed consoles have unified memory: their CPU and the GPU read and write into the same memory. Most PCs simply can't do that.",
"The right requirements aren't just \"be more powerful than the console\" The hardware and software is fundamentally different, and acts differently. This is why you can't just play PlayStation games on Xbox or vice versa. your PC has to figure out how every single piece of code would interact with every piece of data. It's not like a person pretending to move like a mouse would. It's like a person trying to, in real time, move all the little muscles in a little model of a mouse exactly as the mouse would, do all the calculations to figure out how each muscle and impact would affect the next, and affect the next one. That's a lot of calculations every second just to figure out what the mouses system naturally does. The mouse does it naturally through it's nervous system. The human controls itself naturally through it's nervous system. But for the human to move the mouse model, the human has to do a ton of calculations every second to figure out what the mouses system would do and how it would respond and interact, while naturally using its own human nervous system to move itself to move the mouse model."
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hvxs8c | How do adblockers know to block the ads? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Adblockers usually know URL addresses that serve ads and block those. That, plus an adblocker can read a website's script and compare it to a database of ad scripts, especially invasive ones, and remove those from your webpage. They're not perfect on every website, but since 90%+ of the web relies on Google Ads in some way then it's not really hard. Add to that the fact that most people will only care about blocking ads on the most popular websites like YouTube and such, and those can be made sure to be compatible with the adblocker software by the dev team directly."
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hw3i12 | Who gives certain websites the authority to sell domain names? | Say I wanted to make a website with the domain name, URL_1 . Why do I have to buy the name from a company like URL_2 , or URL_0 ? Who gives them permission to sell domains? Do companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung need to use these sites to keep their domains online? If not, how do they do it free of charge? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The highest level of domains are so-called “top-level domains” (com, .edu, .org, etc). Each TLD has a single organization responsible for maintaining a database of names within it. To register a domain name, the average person has to go through a middleman, who communicates with the TLD to register the name. That is what GoDaddy does.",
"There has to be someone to make sure that names are not duplicated. Keeping those records costs money, so you have to pay your share. The registrars, who are selected by ICANN, have contracts with the companies that run those websites, and many others. Big companies might sign their own contracts, but it's a cost tradeoff. I just don't know that Apple needs a lot of new domains every year."
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hw67es | Why do cameras use a quick flash instead of, say, five seconds of sustained light? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"there's two ways of providing lighting for photography. 1. flash which is a quick burst of high powered light 2. continuous lighting which is basically a lamp pointed at the subject/model. there are pros and cons to both methods. the flash method uses less power, doesn't cause your model to overheat/melt, and is portable and can be run off battery. however, you don't get to see immediately what you exposure or shadows look like so it may take some experimentation every time something changes.",
"The camera shutter is only on for a brief period of time and therefore the longer sustained light would make no difference"
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hw85q7 | If an old school phone was bugged but hung up, could the FBI, etc still hear in, or only when a call went through. If not always, why not? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Old school wiretaps were called wiretaps because that was literally what they were - your telephone line was strung up on a utility pole outside of your house and someone would climb up there and splice another cable into your phone line (IE, they would physically tap into it). When you take an old analogue phone off of the hook it creates an open line to the telephone company. If you just leave your phone off the hook, then that line stays open and the telephone company can hear anything that the phone picks up. Because an old school wiretap was placed on the telephone pole outside of your house - before the line got to the telephone company - anyone listening in on that tap could hear anything that the telephone company could hear. However, when your phone was on the hook it would depress a button which would close the line, preventing the telephone from transmitting any sound. So as long as the phone was on the hook a wiretap couldn't be used to listen to anything that the phone could hear.",
"Depends on the kind of bug. If it was a listening device hidden inside the phone they wouldn't be able to hear. If it was a wire tap they'd only be able to hear when there was a call going through, because they would be listening into the electronic signal sent through the phone lines, not from a separate listening device. If the phones hung up then it's not transmitting any signal down the phone line."
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hw92jb | Why do devices need both a MAC address and a local IP address? | I found a post asking this question but the OP already knew some things I didn't so the replies didn't make too much sense. I know that public IP addresses show where you are and that MAC addresses show who you are, but I still don't understand why it would need the MAC address if each device connected to the LAN has a local 192.168-type address. I know that IP addresses change while MAC addresses always stay the same, but I don't see why that would matter, because it's not like the address is going to change in the middle of downloading information. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Network technology is done in layers. Layer 4, the transport layer, is where TCP and UDP hang out. These protocols need a routable Internet address to send their packets from the host to the destination. These addresses are supplied by the network layer (layer 3) which includes protocols like the Internet Protocol (which uses IPv4 or v6 addresses), AppleTalk DDP (an old datagram protocol once used by Apple) or IPX. But in order for the network layer data to travel across the physical equipment of cables and radio waves (layer 1), it requires a format that links the data to the hardware, called the Data Link Layer (layer 2). Layer two is actually subdivided into two layers: the Media Access Control layer and the Logical Link Control layer ( MAC and LLC). The Mac layer manages how a device gains access to network data and controls which devices have permission to transmit, dropping connections to hardware that doesn’t have appropriate permission. In order to do this over Ethernet and WiFi networks, a MAC ID is assigned to each device gateway ( a device can have multiple gateways, but each one is its own network entity). This ID is then assigned permissions on the physical layer, and data is dropped that doesn’t have permission, both at the endpoint and at the router (switches drop all signals with a target MAC ID that isn’t in their zone). The LLC then controls frame syncing, flow control and error correction for the physical layer between MAC endpoints for all data that isn’t dropped."
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hw96ij | How could the glasses with blue on the left red on the right be 3D glasses? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The blue side is fed the red image and the red side is fed the blue image, since each side blocks its own colour out (think red objects under a red light, if everything is a red hue red items appear lighter). Two images are projected on top of each other, one for each eye. They create false perception of depth and as a result your brain makes this appear as 3D. The further the two images appear apart the greater the difference in depth i'm pretty sure. Unfortunately this older method of red and green or red and blue affects the colour of the film in a small way. Newer, polarised lenses (non red/blue) achieve a similar effect with vertical and horizontal polarisation similar to that of some sunglasses but in different orientations (horizontal/vertical) I'm not an expert but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong :) Edit - spelling",
"3D requires that your eyes get two different pictures taken by two different cameras. The blue lens blocks red light. The red lens blocks blue light. So now, the same screen can show two overlaid pictures. A red and blue one. The red picture goes to the eye with the red lens, and is blocked for the eye with the blue lens. The opposite is true for the blue picture. This gives each eye a different picture, resulting in 3D."
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hwca3q | Why do old games (Max Payne, GTA VC etc) made for 4:3 screens get kind of stretched when you render them at 16:9 in a widescreen monitor while moderns games supports all sorts of aspect ratios? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Simply because back then there were only 4:3 screens, so the designers didn't even think about adding the option to resize it. The stretching is done by your videocard, and it might offer options for black bars at the sides too."
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hwd4uv | Why do mobile processors have networks like 5g/4g integrated with it? | The other day I was reading something like Qualcomm Snapdragon xxx has 5g integration and it got me wondering what does the type of supported mobile network have to do with a processor? The processor's job is to process instructions. What has that to do with mobile network speed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Snapdragon is a SoC, not processor. It has a lot more coprocessor than just the modem (e.g. usb Controller, gps, video decoder, gpu, that processor listening to hello google..) On most phone it handles pretty much everything you can throw at it, very rarely manufacture put their own additional coprocessor on the board.",
"The \"processor\" in your phone isn't the equivalent to the CPU in your computer, its the equivalent to the entire motherboard. A Qualcomm Snapdragon is a System On a Chip (SoC) and contains the CPU, GPU, camera controller, WiFi modem, Bluetooth modem, and 4G modem. Why do we make one really complicated chip try to do everything? Power and space! There is a minimum size to any chip, just to get the power pins and input pins makes a chip much larger than the die inside of it, so if you instead pack dies from multiple different chips into one package so they talk to each other inside the package you save a ton of space on the packed phone board. The other problem is power, it takes a minimum amount of power to keep a chip awake, and extra power to keep it running. By integrating the various chips into the SoC you don't have to pay the standby power for the external modem when its not in use, and you can reduce its on state power by having it use features the rest of the SoC already shares. Early 5G phones have had to use external 5G modems which has significantly increased their power consumption so while the Samsung S20 has a 4000 mAh battery, it won't last much longer than the S10 that came before it with just a 3400 mAh battery"
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hwe98g | How do noise cancelling headphones work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Noise canceling headphones rely on a property of waves called *destructive interference.* If you combine two waves such that the peaks of one overlap the troughs of another, the two will cancel out and you'll get a much lower wave. Noise canceling headphones include a small microphone and computer that analyzes incoming sound, then projects such an opposing wave so the user ends up hearing something much quieter than the noise in the environment.",
"Noise cancelling headphones use a microphone to detect noise and then use the speakers to play a sound to cancel out the noise. As an analogy, think of a toddler pushing and pulling on a table to try to spill a glass of juice. This pushing and pulling is similar to sound waves that push and pull on your ear drum. Now, to prevent the juice from spilling, the toddler’s parents get a second toddler (the headphone speaker) and place him on the other side of the table. The parents then watch the first toddler to figure out when he is going to push or pull and how hard. This is similar to the microphone listening for noise. They then tell the second toddler to push or pull so that he can cancel out the motion of the first toddler, and prevent the juice from tipping over."
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hweu9u | Why does sending a thank you email increase the carbon footprint? The computers are on anyway? | I keep seeing notices to stop sending thank you emails as it’s increasing the carbon footprint, but if the computers are all ok and we live in an age of always on internet, how does that small data transfer make a difference? Doesn’t a computer CPU still have have cycles even though it might not be “processing” anything? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It would increase the carbon foot print extremely minimally, But honestly if you are at the point where you avoid sending emails you better have done a lot of far more impactfull stuff first. It is not you computer and the recipients computer that is involved in sending mails, but an entire infrastructure of mail servers that process and maybe relay the mails. In the end anything sent over the internet causes some activity and consumption of electricity which in most cases creates a greater carbon footprint. The difference is really so minimal as to be academic though. Every little bit helps, but this bit helps so little that I can't imagine anyone taking it seriously.",
"Who are you seeing these notices from? Are they perhaps printing out all the email you send them. They might be idiots, but it's hard to tell.",
"The number of the mail server that is needed depending on the total amount of mail that is sent. So more usage requires more servers. A computer that do nothing consumes less power than one that does something so it requires a small amount of extra energy to process an email. So the marginal effect of a single email is low because that do not change the number of servers but there are billions of people on the internet so the total effect can be quite large if it is a minuscule effect per person. So there is two problems with your assumption one is that the number of servers used is independent of the number of email sent. So there will be more computer always on. The other is that the CPU uses the same power if they just wait or if the do something that is not correct.",
"It's the same logic as turning off a lightbulb one hour a day. On its own, it doesn't do much and the electricity is being produced anyway. On a global scale, it reduces our energy usage which drives down consumption quite dramatically for how small the act is. Every single e-mail sent and received is more time spent in front of a computer, which is more time a computer may be kept on for which is more electricity consumption. Small effect on a large scale makes for a huge difference.",
"A computer being idle and a computer actively doing something are two different things, and of course doing something will use more energy. Although it takes an incredibly small amount of additional energy for a computer to process one additional email to the millions that it already processes, it does add up eventually. Also, the Internet is incredibly complicated, requiring hundreds of computers and other electronic equipment to work, and all of those are needed to send and receive an email. Another way to think of it is that if everyone on earth sends just 1 thank you email, that's 7.5 billion emails that need to be processed. If you can prevent everyone from sending that email, you're saving quite a lot, even if individually it doesn't feel like a lot.",
"I suspect this is based on the concept that an on but idle computer uses less energy than an on but computing something computer. If millions of people stopped, it may move the needle in a way a highly sophisticated measurement tool might see. MIGHT. I liken it to: striking a match from a matchbook contributes to our carbon foot print! Rain drop on an ocean. Need a LOT of them to begin to matter ...",
"It increases the carbon footprint of all the people who print out every email they receive. /s",
"It doesn’t actually. Not really sure who says that, but you’re right, those servers are already on anyways and the processing power used to send/receive the kB of data doesn’t influence the power usage at all.",
"> Doesn’t a computer CPU still have have cycles even though it might not be “processing” anything? Yes and no. When not under stress, modern CPUs tend to underclock themselves. While the cycles would still need to be run, it can afford to do them less frequently. As for the carbon footprint, if you're being conscious of sending thank-you emails, then it's probably because you've already optimised the hell out of the rest of your life. It isn't going to change much of anything at the best of times, unless you're doing something like email-to-fax.",
"You're assuming that computers use the same amount of electricity at all times, which is not true. A modern computer can adjust its clock speed (how fast it's working) according to how much work it has to do. So, a sever that doesn't have many e-mails to route will down-clock itself sooner than one that's constantly fed work to do. So, if everybody in the world were to send fewer thank-you emails, the millions of e-mails would total up to a significant amount of work that could be avoided. Also, remember that sending an e-mail requires more than just your computer and the recipient. There are numerous servers, relays, etc., between you and them. The e-mail is often saved on a server somewhere. The NSA may be listening in, etc. All of that multiplies the amount of energy needed."
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hwiu8d | Why is it that Google can search the entire internet in 0.74 seconds, but searching for something in Microsoft file explorer can take minutes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Google isn't searching the internet when you look for something, it's searching an index that it made of the internet. Sort of like using a phone book to find an electrical company instead of driving around yourself until you find one. Local searches on your computer take a little longer since a lot of times the hard drive is doing other stuff while you're looking for that data. You're making it multi-task.",
"Google spends a lot of time building a searchable index of what they can return in their search engine. They've done a lot of work ahead of time to catalog everything in a way that makes it faster. However, keeping an index like this costs a lot of space, so your computer doesn't maintain an index as in depth as the one Google has. It's like going into a library and looking for a book by just going down all the shelves, versus going into the library and looking up a book in their index cards and then going to the right shelf (I might be dating myself a bit here...).",
"want to search faster on your machine? use Everything. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) it will change your life! n it's free.",
"Google's index isn't the entire internet, it's a carefully curated and optimized directory of search terms and websites, which is massively replicated across a huge number of servers, permitting each request to be handled as quickly as possible. The process of updating, disseminating, and pruning that index is constant, massive, and ongoing, using automated processes to crawl the entire web building the index. When you search your hard drive for a file in explorer, you're using a serial, recursive process to traverse your entire file tree looking for a match for whatever search parameters you made. This kind of linear search is much more time intensive, as the data is, from the perspective of the algorithm, completely unstructured. Let me use an analogy which I think will explain the difference. In your basement you have 100 bankers boxes full of folders with documents in them. The boxes are unlabled, and the contents of the folders are more or less randomized. To find a particular document in that system could take hours, days, or weeks. But if you were to take those boxes, sort through each of them, alphabetize them, label each box, and arrange the boxes so that you could quickly find the box, read the label, find and retrieve the document you wanted, the process could be reduced to minutes. Transfer the documents from bankers' boxes to filing cabinets, it could be seconds. PS: Google used to have a program called \"Google Desktop\" which would use the same type of algorithm Google uses to sift through the internet to sift through your computer, email, etc., and search it more quickly. However, Google discontinued the product back in 2011, on the undertaking that more and more user-data was already in the cloud, so the relative value of the platform to Google and their users was negligible.",
"It searches a index, and what's in that index isn't even a tiny part of the internet, most of the internet isn't indexed.",
"Indexing is a factor, as others have stated. The big difference is that Google has a worldwide cluster of servers specifically designed for their sort of searching, from however many billions of users demand them. Searching File Explorer happens locally on your PC, with its one CPU and maybe one storage drive, as a side feature of Windows, alongside whatever other programs you're running.",
"Some very technical responses here for an ELI5 and a lot about indexes. I'll try cover specifically why google and other online search engines are so much faster than a windows file search. Imagine a truck full of M & Ms but with only one yellow M & M. You want to find the one yellow M & M left. You could try searching for it yourself but that would take hours, maybe days. So instead you get all of your friends to help. You give each one of them a bucket of M & Ms and ask them to check thier bucket for the yellow M & M. Since you're all working together, you can search the full truck much quicker. Google does something similar (but much more complicated obviously). Rather than asking one computer to do the search (like windows has to do because no other computers have the files), it asks thousands of computers to search a little part.",
"Windows search in explorer is an absolute turd and inexplicably slow. You can literally use Windows command prompt and search for things 100 times faster. Windows is perfectly capable of fast searches but this has somehow been crippled in explorer. Software which indexes your drive is faster still.",
"> Why is it that Google can search the entire internet in 0.74 seconds It doesn’t. It already searched the internet and used the results to build an optimized catalog of websites, which it then quickly scanned through when you typed in a search. Instead of driving around the neighborhood making a list of all the businesses, it just looks in the phone book."
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hwke7m | how does digital remastering work for video? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hmm I'm not sure how to answer this one. If you're talking about how films are remastered then that's a different story, I only know about how that works so if someone else knows more then please feel free! Most movies and tv shows are shot on physical film which is very good at keeping as much detail as possible and has the \"highest quality\". Stuff that's shot on video or digital are restricted to that camera's megapixel or sensor limit and are quite difficult to remaster. That's why digital video shot from the early 2000's looks painful and movies from the 60s and 70s tend to look remarkably well when given the special treatment. This is why some directors love to shoot on film because it is almost future-proof in a way. But what is that special treatment? To restore a film it needs to be scanned into something called a Digital Intermediate which is like a digital copy that's at like 8k or even higher. This is because the film itself is very high resolution and holds enough \"resolution information\" to go far above 8k standards and for the remastering to be as effective as possible it needs to be done on as high a resolution as possible to be future proof (for the inevitable \"OMG we have 8K Blu-rays now\"). Once the film is scanned to the largest format (like 8k or higher) it is then put through different stages such as dust removal, noise reduction, colour correction, and all sorts of other nifty tools. Think of it like photoshop but on a frame by frame basis. Once the digital intermediate has been treated it is then converted down to a 1080p/2k/4k version so that you can watch it on the TV or on Blu-ray. When compared to the original and dusty looking film or DVD version this new treatment tends to look pretty good (if the remastering was done well) and with that bump from 480p DVD to 4K you will definitely see some extra detail you couldn't before. & #x200B; EDIT: It is also very difficult to remaster directly to the film as it'll just end up ruining it so that's why people tend to prefer to work off of digital intermediates or digital masters. If you're wondering how normal video (such as digital video) is remastered then that's a more difficult explanation. Most people tend to use specific computer programs that upscale (blow up the image) and add various filters and tools to help make it look presentable. Tools such as sharpening, de-interlacing, de-noising and all sorts of stuff. It won't make it look amazing (compared to a film remaster) but nowadays we can do a lot through the computer. Most things that weren't possible a few years ago are now so easy it could almost be done on a netbook (I wouldn't recommend it though as it'll just chug and slow down or melt the poor thing)."
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hww000 | Why are modern artists able to draw hyper-realistic art using just a pen/pencil, but artists from 100+ years ago weren’t able to? | Edit: In regards to what I mean by hyper-realistic, I’m referring to artwork seen here: [Pics]( URL_0 ) these are almost photograph quality. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Photography changed how we paint. Hyper realism uses photographs as reference and is an excellent way to zoom in or keep a light source or models still. Before photography a similar technique was used, \"camera obscura\" but it didnt freeze the images.",
"As with everything, the internet has accelerated the spread and evolution of drawing techniques. Techniques used to evolve like a glacier, today it's an avalanche. When I was young, I had to rent drawing books from the library, and my skills were limited to what I learned from those books and what I figured out on my own. A few years ago, a simple tip passed on my facebook timeline that greatly improved my drawing skills. Just passed me by and I picked it up. That didn't happen 100+ years ago. But it does injustice to many great artists who made incredibly realistic art, like Da Vinci, Rubens or Van Eyck. EDIT: because everyone wants the tip; it's to focus on the angles. Everything is triangles. If you keep copying triangles to the best of your ability, you'll have a very realistic copy of the entire picture. It helps a lot for things like eyes and hands.",
"Besides the technical issues listed here, before the advent of impressionism, realism was highly desirable in art. Take a look at, for instance Caravaggio. Although the lighting is stylised the depiction of human forms are incredibly accurate. When the Impressionist gained traction people realised that an artwork could be more than a moment captured in time and that feeling could be more important than realism. This led directly to the many forms of modern art. So what you may be thinking is that people were unable to paint realistically but they could, they just chose not to as they explored the more abstract nature of art, and hence images such as those made by Dali, Picasso, Rothko et al. To be clear, I'm not an artist or art historian, so I may be wildly off base here, this is just my understanding of art history from having read a handful of books.",
"Most artists weren't (and aren't) interested in photo realistic art. Art isnt necessarily about capturing reality in a perfect way. I think it partly came with pop culture and - without wanting to insult the modern day artists - feels more like a skill trick or an attraction than the work of the visual artists of the past, who were more interested in capturing reality in (for example) a more impressionist way in the 1800s.",
"I’m pretty sure there were quite realistic paintings from back then. Or perhaps realistic enough from painting someone in real life from reasonable distance. We have photos now that can show incredible detail, be saved and looked at for months on end, and zoom into a skin pore. Like all things it’s a combination of modern stylistic choices and technological advances.",
"Every year the relative cost of art supplies drops to the lowest level that its ever been in history. When people get told that they frequently say things like \"oh but its still expensive nowadays\" and while that's true for impoverished people - it is not for the vast majority of people. Its also important to understand what expensive means in a historical context. \"Expensive\" in the context of the mid 1800's means that paper is so expensive that most people use small chalk boards when they need to draw something. Expensive in the context of the 1600's means that purchasing art supplies for a single individual is the equivalent of a modern public works project - only very wealthy governments could do it and even then they could only support a handful of people at once. Relatively speaking, supporting people like Leonardo Da Vinci was the modern day equivalent of building an aircraft carrier. And this is all ignoring that basically anyone can afford a tablet nowadays. What this all means is that historically most people did not possess the means to even attempt to create artwork and there were periods and places in which literally no one could afford it. When and where people could afford it, making art was limited to a handful of extremely rich or extremely lucky people. Another aspect of this is free time. When you go back to premodern times most people are working 60+ hour weeks. They also lack the machines that make a lot of otherwise burdensome tasks quite simple nowadays - things like electric ovens, gas/electric ranges, dishwashers, cloths washers, or even things like sponges and dish soap didn't exist 100 years ago, at least not in a form that is anywhere close to what they are today. Without those things just doing basic life stuff, such as cooking and cleaning, took literally forever. Even if people could afford art supplies, many just didn't have the time. Then there is a lack of access to information. Nowadays you can go on youtube and watch high quality tutorials on how to create art, or just look at fine art on the internet. Even on a very basic level you can go to a museum and take pictures of the art so that you can study it at home. 100 years ago none of that exists. The absolute best you can do is to go to a museum and practice while you're there - assuming that you live close enough to a museum to even get there to begin with and that the museum will just let you sit there practicing. And unless you live in New York, London, Paris, or a handful of other international cities the chances of there being an art museum where you live is low. Those three things - widespread access to art supplies, free time, and practice material are all things that have only come into existence recently for the vast majority of people. Without those three things its difficult to impossible to learn how to make art.",
"This is simply not true. Artists throughout history have been able to execute incredibly realistic drawings for over 500 years. Artists like Watteau, Ingres, Sandys, and many more, drew from life and reproduced what they saw exceptionally, with simple tools, some even before the pencil itself.",
"It's basically a skill called rendering. Most trained artists probably could/ can, but didn't bother as it really is just a basic technical skill that takes a lot of time more than special talent, and isn't even really a desirable aesthetic, among most artists, who usually prefer art that embodies unique and fresh ways of representing a the subject. So what became successful for being unique in the art world were hyperreal representations of very mundane everyday subjects like an egg, or a sandwich, or showcasing the skill with a lot of seemingly complex reflections ( water droplets), which actually make the effect even easier to create. The primary skill applied is tedious patience.",
"A lot of people have correctly replied mentioning the importance of photography as a reference but it's also really important in forming a viewer's perception of what \"realistic\" is. Nowadays we can take a picture which is a really simple optical impression of something, whereas drawing/painting is a lot more processed because it involves the human brain processing the image twice as opposed to once with a photo. There's a notion of \"likeness\" in painting that's quite a useful counterpoint. Humans identify faces exceptionally well which allows artists a lot more flexibility in making a portrait recognisable. Singer Sergeant identified several key elements: shape of head, proportion and position of features. Get these right and viewers will recognise who it is. If that is the main focus of the painting it will look more realistic. However Singer Sergeant and Velazquez for instance don't exactly recreate the image, instead focusing on the optical (light on eyes) effect of the image. Since the 1600s this would be considered \"realistic\".",
"Much of our early art was driven by access to complex art tools and materials for mediums. Paints, for example, often used actual ground gems and was formed into a paste that included eggs whites to form a texture and drying speed similar to a modern medium called \"gesso\". These mediums had a profound impact on both technique and realism. If your paint dries rapidly or materials are hard to acquire, you can't quite do techniques like soft blending, or color tone and hue experimentation, which are important to the depiction of realism. During our early eras, much of our artwork is simplified designs for decoration or expressions of wealth, like jewelry or textiles. This could be very complex but not realistic, like much of the viking-era knotwork or the clay work of early germanic tribes. You also see a huge shift in terms of realism for societies that had access to wax and began lost-wax casting, and those that had access to clay. However, one thing that dominated was mediums in 3D; we hadn't quite gotten the manufacturing of paper down, so most art remained in a 3d medium. Eventually, Greece and Rome dominated economically, and much of this art is attempts and growth towards *very* realistic representations. Their dyes are vibrant and colors were easier to acquire, they valued art in society for more than just simple decorations, and they had a strong patronage system that allowed expensive but very workable mediums like marble to be proliferated in the art world. However, in these eras, art still florushed as a 3D medium and rarely was it done on paper. Towards the end of the roman empire, there was even a stylistic shift in painting to include backgrounds rather than just subjects of focus, which started a movement for *perspective* art. When the trade system of rome collapsed, so too did the art world. In the medieval era, much of what we had learned was rapidly lost and our art regressed. Art shifted towards textiles and simple colors, as paper was extremely hard to acquire and make. Art at this time was descriptive, often using allegory and symbolism to log important events and information. Many people couldn't read or write and were so impoverished that exploring art just wasn't a possibility. The rennaisance is the major era that followed the medieval ages, with a slow but steady improvement of realism during the late medieval and gothic eras. By the rennaisance, Europe had largely recovered from the economic collapse of Rome and was just recovering from the Bubonic Plague. During this era, many aspects of the romance-language world had a retro revival period romanticizing the roman and greco periods. The artists of this era greatly drove the methodology for mixing more vibrant colors and experimenting with new techniques, art mediums became extremely varried, and mediums shifted from the 3d to the 2d. We also see that artists like Da Vinci had easy access to paper, and could sketch using tools like charcoal, which is a very important step in developing literal skill for drawing realism. You see this massive shift towards hyper realism in artists like Bernini, Da Vinci, Donatello, Raphael, and Botechelli in a very short period of time, with each of these artists having vastly different levels of skill and style, and all being alive at roughly the same 200 year period. Many people during this era saw artistic talent a reflection of dieism, and extremely wealthy families like the Di Medici invested heavily in artists and their access to tools and techniques that could be used as tribute to the church. Another big thing that happened in this rennaisance era and beyond that impacted realism was oil painting. Oil painting is a long-drying art medium in which you blend colors directly on the canvas. This really only kicked off after the rennaisance, but replicating the results became important to many artists. These blending techniques provided by oil painting allowed for easily exploring gradients and shading which is nearly impossible in early artwork or in much of what was produced in the medieval era. If you want to see a master of oil painting, look no further than Rembrandt, who was at the tail end of this era in the 1600s. This largely continued until the european expansion and the age of imperialism kicking off in the 1700s. You see a huge contrast in realism when comparing the early American colonial artwork to artists of the aristocracy of france, england, the netherlands, spain, and italy. The Americas looked like something drawn by children, and again this brings the contrast of how access to tools and techniques impacts realism. Eventually, the lndustrial revolution happened, and techniques and process floruished. Artists could suddenly share ideas and information thanks to printed media. Barriers to complexity of textile art was suddenly trivial. You didn't need to travel across the sea to just to see and learn from the works of the old masters. You could capture ideas easily in water color, or sketch frequently with access to paper. This era basically led to an explosion of artwork in all directions, not just towards realism. Surrealism and Realism could both be captured, which you can see in artists like Dali. Additionally, as everyone else is mentioning, scenes can be captured quite easily on film media for practice and study. Finally, we get to now. The 1970s basically introduced the computer which has become one of the most important tools in realism. Tools like photoshop allow for a great range of mixed media techniques. You can put color on a canvas and treat it like oils or water colors, or both at the same time. You are unlimited by the drying times of your paint, and you can have *exact* colors. Thanks to 3d modeling and photography, true realism can be used as a template for study, literally to the point that you can fake reality. TL:DR; Art has evolved towards realism in response to the economic and societal conditions for the artist at the time. Stylistic methods and skills are shared between artists of an era, and having access to cheap, easily acquired materials is important for practice and leads to better representations of realism. In early eras, it wasn't so much that people didn't want realism, but that they're literally too poor to develop it.",
"Projecting images, digital zoom, and large format printing. Basically the ability to project an outline of a photograph onto paper and then fill in the shades. It’s an advanced coloring book. There are a lot of long replies here, that have some interesting points, but the reality is that they get a photograph onto their “canvas” and color by numbers. Plz Don’t interpret my ELI5 as condescending to the artist or artwork. It’s amazing. I am, however, being slightly condescending to all the comments that make the technique seem deeper than it is. That’s an old pet peeve I have from art school pontificating.",
"Who says they couldn't? A lot of very good art was painted and in a photorealsitic way in the past, Joseph Wright is just one example though 100 years ago Cubism was 'in' so a lot of art barely resembled reality, abstract art, impressionism and others also don't focus on realism as that was for the realm of the Realists. What's in sells and artists don't generally draw for the fun of it and will often create art in the form that is currently trending as that's what sells and art supplies aren't cheap. Hobbyists will of course create art for pleasure but the serious full-time artists won't as they won't spend time and resources on creating a photo-realistic portrait if everyone is buying Cubism. Look at Mondrian, he spent years painting landscapes and was practically a nobody, he visited Paris, saw the Cubists and became famous for painting a few quadrilaterals in a non-uniform grid some bright colours. I'm sure if you delved into the back catalogue of artists a hundred years ago you might find some high quality sketches but you won't find them on display (unless there's an art gallery with literally no other pieces by an artist and they picked up a few cheaply in an auction) art galleries won't display art that doesn't fit the mould of their sections, so they'll have a Cubist section with Monet, Mondrian etc. but you won't see their non Cubist work in another section nor will you see artists famous for another form who did some Cubism in their spare time. So just because you haven't seen it or won't see it unless you sift through the art not on display it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.",
"It’s sculpture and not drawing - but look up Bernini (early to mid 1600’s) and Carpeaux (mid 1800’s). They both did incredible realistic sculptures in stone.",
"They are \"cheating\" by using photographs as references. They are acting like human printers which isn't that impressive if you think about it since printers will always be better. Tim's Vermeer is a documentary about a guy with no artistic skills creating a masterpiece by copying a picture dot by dot. It takes a long time but the result is the same. URL_0 The actual composition of the photographs they took is where the art was created. Another metaphor would be stealing a comedian's set of jokes. Anyone can repeat them and make people laugh but the real work was writing the jokes.",
"It's photorealistic. It looks like a photo which your brain decides is \"real\". Your eyes/brain don't interpret the world like that when you're just looking around at stuff. So back before cameras, they couldn't draw photorealistically, since photos didn't exist.",
"They were. Check out pretty much any work that was designed to be used as a reference- biology, medical, architecture, etc.- rather than being intended as 'art'. That's what those guys were doing back then. Artistic tastes change and hyperrealism isn't always considered desirable.",
"Controversial take but I dont really like hyper realistic art. Stylisation adds alot of life to drawings and while technically impressive its boring.",
"Well, for me the easy answer is to say they never wanted either have the time to do so, hyperrealism has only been here for a few years when you put it in perspective, art had evolved to that point where we're interested in representing the wold in that way plus the techniques have been perfected to that point too",
"So so so many factors. Quality of materials. Photography. More people having access to materials and good instruction and the free time to take advantage of it is a big one. As well as stylistic preference. Think about video games on the playstation 2. Someone looking back might ask the same question. And a lot of the same answers apply. Technology has improved, more people expect and desire realism, more people are working on projects together, more people have had the time to decide they want to do it and been able to get the proper training, etc.",
"I'm always bitter and cynical about it. Those moden 'artists' are for the most part nothing more than human copying machines. They just split the photo up into tiny squares and redraw each square one by one. There's barely any skill involved. Notice how most of them don't paint, since proper painting requires making large strokes and taking the whole picture into consideration at once. Old masters did just that, at least most of them. They studied anatomy, techniques etc. for years to be able to paint realistically. If you want someone modern to admire, look up Cesar Santos. He paints almost photorealistic portraits using those techniques, knowledge and measurements. Also, keep in mind that old artists also often 'cheated'. The difference, for me at least, is that their goal was to do what cameras do today automatically, capture realistic images. You may want to look up 'Tim's Vermeer', a neat documentary on this topic.",
"Everyone should watch Tim's Vermeer, this documentary goes in depth about this very subject. [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 )",
"They could. But aping a photograph wasn't considered a particularly high achievement...nor is it now in any real world sense outside of Reddit or meme culture. It's more of a parlor trick than revealing any artistic vision (with all due respect to the technical ability of those illustrators) What is valued is having the vision to depict something of how someone sees their world. And artists, then and now, strive towards that.",
"It's hard to draw something photorealistic, when you dont know what a photography looks like because it was not yet invented. The modern artists you talk about mostly copy photos (or even if not, they copy the \\*feeling\\* of a photography, that everyone knows in the modern day and accepts that this is how the world \\*really\\* looks like). But first of all people in the past didn't want to paint realisticaly. In medieval art people used art as a kind of script, so the paintings didn't have to look like \\*the real world\\* as long as they convey the message. Even in the renaissance artists wanted to paint the \\*ideal world\\*, not the \\*real world\\*. And later around XIX/XX century, when photography was invented, the demand for expensive photo-like paintings declined, and some artists began to wonder how the world \\*really looks like\\*. They were called impressionist and realised that the world is in constant motion, and the colors are subjective so they look differently in different situations and so on and so on. Some of the post-impresionists started using pointillism (as someone in the comments already noted) which is bassicaly old pixel art. And then there were cubists who wanted to paint the \\*real\\* object not just a look of it (hence the weird forms, because they were painting all the sides at once). They even sometimes glued parts of and object to the canvas. But other artists decided that their art sould be about something different than \\*reallity\\* such as emotions (expressionists) or harmony (abstractionists). I hope I explained it at least somehow clearly. I hope you can understand everything (not native here). And if you want to read more about it, there is a really good book called \"The Story of Art\" by Ernst Gombrich. It looks scary, but is an easy and enjoyable read. TLDR: Most of the time artists didn't want to paint realistically. And photos aren't exactly realistic - we just accepted that they are and stopped questioning it.",
"Keep in mind that modern photography defines what “realistic” looks like. “Realism” probably looked different to people centuries ago.",
"Why do people nowadays draw anime-style pictures? Same reason, really.",
"One of the big reasons is time. More people have time now to perfect the craft, due to increase in the overall standard of living. Little Billy and Sara are now able to spend time becoming better artists at a you get age, where Little Billy and Sara 200 years ago were told to get fucked and get outside to help with the harvest and other farm tasks. As well many modern artists are able to fund themselves and their artistry due to a good paying job. Artists 100 plus years ago required a sponsor to really get into their craft, unless the were luck to born wealthy.",
"Art goes threw phases. Rembrandt was active in the 1630's, his art is incredibly lifelike, but then in the 1900s we get Picasso, who is not life-like. By and large how you create art is going to be heavily influenced by who you are taught by and what those around you are doing. While differant, look at the great marble works and busts particularly out of Rome and Greece ~600bc to 476 ad. During this millennium we see progressive improvements in method and design, because you have groups of people all trying to do the same thing better than every one else."
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hwwdhp | What exactly happens when you delete cache from the apps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cache is the stored data from app such as images, downloded data, inputted data. What it does it makes the app load faster by relying on the cached data, rather than download or generating new data everytime you open the app. By clearing the cache the app will be forced to download everything again and build a new cache. It doesnt hurt and is often recommended you do it to keep things running smooth."
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hwweqf | How does a computer represent infinity | so I’ve been solving a bunch of leetcode questions and for some of the math questions i usually have to check some base case involving infinity. i know that numbers are stored in binary but was wondering how infinity is stored or is it just a null value in cs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All the others have a point, but in fact computers do have a mostly universal marker for infinity. The standard according to which floating point numbers (think fractions like 3.5678) are stored have 3 special values that do not correspond to actual numbers. Each floating point value is built from 3 components: a sign bit, an exponent and a fraction. The value is built like this: -(sign)\\*(0.5+fraction)\\*2^(exponent-bias), \"bias\" being 127 for single-precision and 1023 for double-precision values, corresponding to the actual number of bits the exponent is stored on. The special \"numbers\" are: * NaN (Not a Number, for indicating an invalid result) is when the exponent is all \"one\" bits (max value) and the fraction is anything but all zeros. * Infinity is sign=0, exponent at maximum and fraction all zeros * -Infinity is sign=1, exponent at maximum and fraction all zeros URL_0 Whether a specific software actually handles these values or just throws an error when seeing them is up to the programmer."
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hwwp1p | How do compression algorithms work? How do you compress a lot of data into a little, and then back out again? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Compression algorithms are all about finding repeated strings of data, and replacing them with a much smaller string. Here's a very simple, very naive example of something called *run-length encoding,* where long strings of the same data is stored instead of a single data value and a single number representing how many pieces there are. Consider the string: AAAAABBBAAAAAAAABBBBB In run-length encoding, this would become 5A3B8A5B We've taken a 21-character string and *compressed* it to 8! Now, obviously, this is a specially-crafted scenario, and RLE isn't great for much, but it demonstrates the concept: find (or create) strings of data that you can replace with smaller strings, then include instructions for re-creating the file later (or don't, if you don't care about the data you're throwing away).",
"Data compression works by using a compression algorithm to shrink the data and an expansion algorithm to restore the original data. Compression algorithms vary, but the general idea is using tricks to compress patterns into smaller representations. For example, you could compress “AAAAABBBB” into “5A4B”. That particular method loses its effectiveness when the data is already organized. Compressing something such as “AABABBBABAAAB” would give 2A1B1A3B1A1B3A1”, which makes the data longer. Because of this, smarter methods need to be used. The most common method is Huffman compression, which replaces the most common patterns with the shortest codes and the less common patterns with longer codes. The expansion algorithm simply replaces the shortened code with the original code using a reversal of the compression algorithm. With this method of lossless compression, the original data can be reclaimed exactly when uncompressed. Certain types of data can also benefit from lossy compression - methods which cuts out small parts of the data which won’t be noticed when uncompressed. Examples include JPEG, MP3, and MPEG. These work well because the data lost is usually not noticeable, and more space can be saved by cutting out data. This has a drawback - each time you compress this way more data is lost until a point where it can become very noticeable. This is what gives reused jpegs their grainy appearance - they’ve been saved as jpegs so many times that natural disruption becomes visible.",
"The methods are complex, but here's one way that is easy to understand - Say you had a black and white picture of a document. Most of that page is white, with some black pixels representing the text. It is 2000 pixels across, and 3000 down Instead of storing that as 6 million bits that are either 1 or 0 for black and white, you say, starting tat the top corner, say, \"the first 10,050 pixels are white, then 2 black, then 20 white....\" and so forth. This takes a lot less space, but you could use those instructions to recreate the original. Other methods are just more complex examples of that. More generally compression recognises patterns in the original, and records those patterns. Decompression takes that description of the patterns and recreates the original."
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hwxskb | How are animations made? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hand drawing complete frames for animations have not been common since the early 20s. Artists draws each element in the scene seperatly and then animators take these elements and combines them. For example an artist can draw a bunch of different versions of mouths for a character and then the artist will for each frame pick the mouth that fits the dialog or facial expression for each frame. The same mouth can be used with a bunch of different eyes and ears for example giving the character a lot of different facial expressions. The same mouth can then be used for a lot of different frames even if the characters move around as long as the head of the character is roughly the same. There are other sets of mouths for when the charecter is seen in profile for example. The techniques for doing this have changed somewhat and today there is a lot of computer assistance in this process allowing thousands of elements be combined in the same scene at a very high framerate. But the concept is still the same."
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hwxv7u | How do speaker play different sounds at once? Like if you have a bass drum hit and crash symbol, how does a single speaker produce that sound? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Struggling to make this ELI5 but basically the speaker doesn’t produce multiple sounds at once, it creates one sound that sounds like multiple to our ears. Less ELI5: The speaker pushes the air in front of it to approximate how the air moves when the drum and cymbal are hit, it’s only one speaker so as you say it’s can do both at once, it can only approximate them, two speakers gives a better sonic image, but more speakers does this better still. Last year I had the opportunity to work in a studio with a surround system of 29 speakers, with this you can very accurately recreate natural sounds as you can move the air from multiple directions at once, not just the static position of one speaker.",
"Have you ever thought about how your ear drum can interpret those sounds at the same time? It's exactly the same problem in reverse. Basically if you move a speaker in the the way you want an ear drum to move, the person is going to hear what you want them to hear.",
"This is pretty much it on one graph : URL_0 Each sound has a different wave. Guitar, voice, bass, snare, and crash all have their own unique wave form. But waves can be added together in a way that retains all the energy of the individual waves. This composite wave is what the speaker generates, and what your ear hears. Your brain is what is capable of separating out the individual sounds from the composite wave itself."
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hwykfb | Considering that bent CPU/socket pins are a major problem, why do CPUs/sockets still have pins instead of them being two surfaces with only very short pins or completely flat with contact pads? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's nearly impossible to make good contact between two surfaces with hundreds of connection points if every mating connection is rigidly fixed. This means you need to use some sort of spring-loaded mating system for each individual connection. In case of LGA (Land Grid Array, flat CPU package and pins in socket), the socket pins are basically small springy levers that the CPU is pushed against by the socket retention frame. For PGA (Pin Grid Array, pins on CPU, holes on socket), the pins sink into the socket holes where they are captured between metal \"pincers\" that are held against the pin with force.",
"Flat with flat just wouldn’t work, the contact would be too poor especially in the middle And shorter pins on the cpu would require an a thinner socket, which might not be strong enough and will make less contact Also it’s not as big of a problem as you seem to think, assuming you are careful enough when placing the cpu it’s quite hard to get it to bend the socket pins, and it’s even harder for AMD pins, and even then it’s not that hard to bend back the pins on the cpu",
"Notice how when you take the cooler off how the thermal paste isn't perfectly distributed? That's because the tiny imperfections in each surface mean they don't sit perfectly flush. It's the same with trying to make contact without pins. Infact, if they did make perfect contact, you wouldn't need thermal paste. Additionally, the surfaces can change shape due to heat. Which compounds the issue.",
"It is very difficult to make a good pad to pad contact. Near on impossible actually. But I see no apparent problem with pads and very short pins, to be honest, so no idea why this hasn't been done before. But considering these companies have a shit ton of money and R & D resources - they must've evaluated this idea at some point. So there has to be a good enough reason to not do it"
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hwyy79 | How does a record player needle/cartridge work in stereo? | I understand the grooves in a record are the physical manifestation of sound waves and the needle vibrates in the groove and turns in into an electrical singnal and amplifies that. But, how does it do it in stereo, here, I also understand one side of the groove is the left channel and the other is the right channel but how does the single needle separate the two vibrations? When I change the balance to left or right it seems to be mono because it more or less plays the same exact thing out of each speaker so I suppose a lot of music doesn't really take advantage of stereo? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not actually two sides of a groove with a left channel and a right channel, but instead it's one somewhat complex groove. One dimension (I think the one that makes the needle go up and down) has the \"mid\" channel—the stuff that's going into both sides. The other dimension makes the needle move from side to side, and it consists of the \"side\" channel, which contains the difference between what's going into the left speaker and the right speaker. The left channel is formed from adding this difference to the mid channel, and the right channel is formed by subtracting the difference from the mid. So you'll have the needle getting wiggled around a couple of directions at once rather than just one for mono records. Speaking of, that's how this system provides backward compatibility with mono records: it's just one \"mid\" channel, with no \"difference\" information."
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hwz71n | how a planet's axis tilt is measured | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is, I believe, measured relative to the plane of the orbit. So if the planet is rotating with the axis of rotation perpendicular to the orbital plane, the axial tilt is 0.",
"It's relative to the plane of the planet's orbit around the sun. Stable orbits are two dimensional, so you measure it against that."
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hx1atb | What’s the purpose of some websites requiring you select ‘I am not a robot’? And would what prevent a bot from selecting this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The simple \"I am not a robot\" checkmarks actually have a lot behind them. They're watching your behaviour as you move about the page. They look at how your mouse moves to the box, how quickly it clicks, etc., all to see if you're likely a human or not. If there's any issues with the confidence of the results, it prompts you with another verification, such as the picture grid.",
"The purpose: to prevent bots from creating spam accounts and other spam-like activities that would be a nuisance. When you click the box, an algorithm is analyzing your reaction time and the path your mouse cursor takes to reach the box and click it. If the reaction time is very short and the box is clicked in an artificial-looking way, the algorithm becomes suspicious that you are a bot. It then makes you solve a captcha. The captcha is a grainy image that is very difficult for computers to analyze and interpret. If you can solve the captcha, you are proved to be a human.",
"It helps to prevent scripts from making accounts or logging in. It requires a little bit of intelligence to pull it off and most scripts/bots don't have that.",
"Well, the tests based on reading scrambled letters are meant to be nigh impossible for a bit to read. But tests that require you to just click a button actually can get clicked by bots, the bots just do it too fast. A normal human will take half a second to see the screen, then drag their mouse over (in probably a real inefficient curvy line) to the button, maybe miss the first time, and then click it. Boom, it lets you in. A bit on the other hand, will instantly recognize the button the second it’s loaded, and will instantly move its cursor in a perfect, straight line, to where the button is, and try to click it all significantly faster than a human can. This unnaturally speed is what flags this attempt as a bot, as opposed to a normal human. You’ll also notice sometimes when you do click the button very quickly cuz your ready for it, it will then take you to a second test, images or letter, and double check that you’re a human that way.",
"Also a fun fact adding to what everyone said, you're helping train their computer vision by labeling these images. [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 )"
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hx3fzv | Why are more websites moving to that simple "I'm not a robot" captcha checkbox instead of the more complicated "check all the buses" style captchas? It seems like the latter would be loads safer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The \"I'm not a robot\" checkbox is actually doing a lot of work behind the scenes, looking at things like mouse movement and timing to see how quickly you check that box, what path your mouse takes, and so on. If it has any doubt, it will then challenge you again with the more conventional CAPTCHA's.",
"Our site moved to the racaptcha v3 where it doesnt show the check box instead it sees how you interact with the site and then displays a challenge it it suspects youre a bot. Easy on users Bit as other stated it checks your mouse movements and other data behind the scenes to make sure youre not a bot. Some sites force it on every check where you have to do a challenge though"
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hx6n6u | How are 400 hours of footage uploaded every minute to YouTube? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're counting the total number of video uploaded every minute. Or, more likely, averaging it to emphasize the point of how much content is on YouTube. Your actual upload time for YouTube will vary depending on the video and your internet connection, but let's say you have an hour-long video and it takes a minute to upload. Now imagine there's 399 other people doing the same at the same time. That'd be 400 hours uploaded in that minute. The math isn't the clean in real life, but the general idea is still the same."
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hx8ou0 | What is GPT-3? How does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is what it does. Whatever you type in the box, the machine will try to come up with what should come next. So if you put \"Once upon a time,\" it will make a fairy tale. If you put \"The angry fireman said\" it will come up with something an angry fireman would say. Or if you write \"How to get your cat out of a tree:\" it will tell you that. (Although sometimes it just makes up answers for things instead of telling the true answer.) This is how it works. Some people built a big computer and showed it all the writing on the internet. And they wrote the program so that it would be able to learn all the patterns about what people write next, after any words. Even sentences it had never seen before, it could guess what people would put next from the patterns it learned."
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hxa97v | Why is download speed generally faster than upload? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly it's about price adjustment based on usage. High upload speeds are useful for people who server content, these are usually businesses selling (or advertising upon) that content. High download speed are useful for consumers of said content. Consumers are more price conscious than businesses, so providers want to charge them less than businesses. One way to do that is to provide a cheap product with high download and low upload speeds. That is well suited to the consumer needs without allowing businesses to \"freeload\" by making the product ill-suited to their needs. This is the same dynamic that makes plane trips across a saturday night cheaper. Business travelers tend to travel during the work week, and usually want to be back home by Friday, while vacation travelers want to travel across a weekend to save vacation days. This allows airlines to charge more for business travel.",
"The assumption is that most people don't upload a lot of data, and so the Internet providers uses most of the bandwidth (the total amount of data capacity available for uploading/downloading) for download so they can advertise the highest download speeds. You could buy a line with equal uploads and download speeds, but for the given bandwidth, that would mean slower downloads, which isn't what most customers want."
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hxb9hh | How does Bluetooth work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Since you can find this on Wikipedia I removed your post."
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hxcg8r | What’s the difference between an “online database” and a “cloud database”? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The general difference is that a typical online database is stored on a specific computer or server. You interact with that computer directly to add and retrieve data. If you need to distribute the database across multiple servers, or make backups, you generally need to set all those up yourself. With a cloud database you don't interact with the database directly. Instead you interact with the cloud services providers front end, and the cloud service will automatically take care of a number of things in the background. In particular setting up the actual database, backups, distributing it across multiple servers in case some server catches fire, etc. There is a middle ground with managed databases where basically a lot of the setup for backups, and such is automated, but the general difference between that and a cloud database is that the cloud databases are built to scale much more readily and be a lot more resistant to someone say, burning a server room to the ground."
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hxco5s | A program tells a computer to interpret a binary sequence that can mean both a letter and a number as one or the other. But if a computer only “sees” this instruction as ones and zeros, aren’t we back to the same problem of how it will differentiate? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's stored the same but depending on where the variable is used it can be different. If the if statement is looking for a int then the binary \"see\" numbers but if it's looking for a char its looking at letters",
"It's contextual - other code has already told the computer if it is looking for the numerical answer or a alphabetical answer. Even though something is the same direct value in such a small sample size of bits, the computer is working with much more information to \"know\" which way it is supposed to use that information.",
"The computer doesn't differentiate. That is the job of the human programmer. Some higher level languages have stronger systems for differentiating various types of data, which takes the responsibility off of the individual programmer. But those languages were also designed by humans and exist at a much more abstract layer than the computer hardware. You might think this means software behavior is prone to human error, and you'd be right. There are entire classes of bugs and security vulnerabilities that arise because a human programmer couldn't manage to get their head wrapped around what type of data they are supposed to be working with at a given place in their program."
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hxcsc6 | How the heck do ZIP files work | Like how do you make a file size smaller but still hold the same amount of data | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Compression. Suppose a file is made of the bits 00001101000. You can compress that to say: there's 4 zeroes, then 2 ones, then 1 zero, then 1 one, then 3 zeroes. So simply shrink that to 042113. Reading it back, you start with a zero, write that four times, then every subsequent number represents the number of times you write the opposite symbol, in this case 1. So four zeroes, 2 ones, etc.. The zero in the beginnig tells you that what the first symbol is. This obviously and definitely NOT how every type of compression works, and it feels more like encoding rather than compressing, but it's a proof of concept to show that you can make data smaller simply by interpreting it in different ways. That's essentially what compression algorithms do. They find patterns in the bits that make up your file, and they write your data in a different way that takes less space.",
"There are a lot of factors in compression, but one of the most common is via de-duplication. A lot of files contain a LOT of duplicated information. Whether it's a bunch of spaces in a row, or the same information repeated in various places, compression essentially writes instructions that say \"put this one thing here, here, here, and here 3x\" instead of writing that information over and over throughout. With the amount of duplicated data, that adds up very fast. So instead of saving the actual file, it's kind of saving instructions on how to recreate that file. Which is why unzipping a file can take a while, since it's rebuilding it from instructions. Compression also helps even more when you're combining multiple files. For one, it will de-duplicate across files. So if two of your files contain a lot of the same information, now it can save the instructions for adding the information back to each of those files instead of keeping multiple copies. But also the way computers store files is kind of complicated. They divide disks up into blocks, and distribute your files across those blocks of data. Let's say it divides the blocks in 4KB each. If your file takes up exactly 4KB, then it uses up one whole block. If the file is 5KB, it uses up two blocks, and all the remaining 3KB of space gets wasted. So a bunch of files will quickly add up to a lot of wasted space. When you compress them together into ONE file, only that one file ends up wasting a little bit of that final block, saving you more. These are just a few of the elements, but some of the most common aspects of how a compressed file works.",
"It's because most typical files tend to be made of patterns. Take normal text for example. If you were to take a bunch of words and assign a number to the most common 65534 you could store all of those words in the same space that two letters would take up, and have one extra number to use as a maker for any extra words that aren't in your table. Actual compression works by looking for patterns intelligently though, scanning for the most common patterns, assigning codes to them, and storing a table of those code/pattern combinations long with the file. As such some things don't compress well. Things without regular patterns such as encrypted files only have some common patterns as a fluke of statistics. So they can be compressed, but usually only a little bit."
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hxepbu | How do motherboards, microchips, USB chip, etc. work? All I see are tiny metal pieces on a plastic green square. How does something so small contain so much? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So there are basic types of electronic components, such as Resistors, Capacitors, Transistors and Inductors. If we think of electricity as water; A resistor as a large pipe transitioning into a smaller pipe, thus allowing less water through. Capacitors and Inductors are like tanks that can be filled and emptied, and transistors can turn the flow of water on and off - this is the component that actually makes the thing \"work\". Over time these components were shrunk to the tiny size you can see on motherboards nowadays. These are the tiny metal squares. The lines on the circuit board connect all these components together in such a way as to allow the transistors to make decisions, while the rest if the components mostly make sure the transistors be below up. If you look at the components on your circuit board through a magnifying glass, you'll see an identifying number on every single one of them. The way these devices actually work and interact with each other is hideously complex, but maybe someone else can explain it better than I have. As for microchips (or microcontrollers), they are essentially just a circuit board that has been shrunk way down onto a single piece of silicon."
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hxeqre | Why does refreshing a page sometimes help it load faster? | Don’t we have the technology to have a page “self-reload” in this situation? Why should a human clicking a button help a situation? Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One reason is that certain technologies let the web server go to sleep if not processing requests, so it can serve other sites that are. There is overhead (code to run) to wake it up and spin it up into processing requests. Once that's complete, subsequent page loads are faster.",
"I would have said caching. It remembers it recently downloaded something and uses the one from disk instead of redownloading it. This probably speeds up browsing considerably and you don't know it because many websites used shared resources. For example, there is a common style used across the web known as bootstrap. Your browser may not download this every time and just use the one it's already downloaded."
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hxeshr | why do movies and tv shows have music parts super loud, and dialogue parts super quiet comparatively | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I recently retired from mixing movies and TV shows, and I have to say this: there are extremely strict requirements (laid out by Dolby Laboratories) designed to make the studios where most shows are final-mixed almost identical in response. The problems arise when the cinemas, TV sets, home sound systems, earbuds etc. don’t conform to those requirements, and believe me, they don’t. You know that surround system you saw for $300? It’s the cheapest 6 speakers and crappy amp they could put together and still make a profit on. You know that great old cinema downtown that’s been there for years? The last time anyone checked the sound system was before you were born. The shows sound amazing on the mix stage, the re-recording mixers (the people who do the final balancing) are usually crying when they hear their mixes butchered in the cinema or on some crappy home system with a blown speaker.",
"Because they are usually balanced for home theaters. That and their audio engineers suck st their jobs. The dialog should be coming from the center speaker which is usually the largest. If it's properly balanced you shouldn't hear a difference. Try switching between sound settings and see if you can tell the difference.",
"Most movies & tv shows are written in 5.1 surround sound (five speakers consisting of left, left center, center, right center, right & one subwoofer) Most home audio systems are 2.0 (a left and a right speaker with no subwoofer) This typically results in 3.1 (left center, center, right center and subwoofer) getting merged or removed completely. Most dialogue is down the center (which gets lost) and a lot of action happens on the left and right. This is how you end up with very loud sounding action sequences, and very quiet dialogue. Many TVs and sound systems offer a \"night mode\" option, which will try to counteract this. With it enabled, it will limit sections that are loud and keep the dialogue roughly the same. It's not perfect by any means but it will help. Source: I'm a music producer",
"It doesn't help that a lot of the dialogue is whispered/mumbled. Seasoned theater actors are so easy to understand whenever they appear on tv/movies.",
"Follow up question... Why don't streaming services like Netflix, or common playback apps, have built in functions to automatically balance/normalize the sound?",
"Edit: Movie industries vary vastly in their standards and practices due to culture differences and the availability of tech. Within the same movie industry there are differences due to skill and tech a producer can hire. So take this to be a VERY GENERAL answer from someone who knows about a SPECIFIC movie industry. I have been informed by good people of reddit that my answer may not be applicable to many western movie industries. Please read this answer, but I request you to check other fantastic answers as well. There is an ongoing, sorry to say this, pandemic of loudness in the music industry. The dialogues are recorded separately in a studio by the actors. The background score is written and recorded by a composer separately. A sound engineer then puts them together. It is at this point the problem occurs. There is a growing trend among the sound engineers to increase the loudness of the recorded music using Digital Signal Processing methods, like dynamic compression, etc. Use of digital recording and storage allows for that. This situation of cranking up the volume to the max is more prevalent in the recording and mixing of the music. The speech is recorded separately and at usual levels. Hence, when they're put together, the speech sounds softer than music in many recordings/movies. The name for this attempt at maximizing loudness in music: the loudness war. Read up more on this debate: URL_0",
"Yes but if you have a two speaker setup, most times you can chose \"stereo\" instead of \"original\" in VLC. Or step up the center speaker in the control panel of a multi speaker setup.",
"Part of this is actually the TVs themselves. You can be the best in the world at dithering audio, but old tube TVs had space for speakers that could physically generate more rounded sound. Now, most TVs have very small speakers that lose a lot of clarity when pushed, and even “sound bars” aren’t optimal if you buy the cheap shit. Edit: should have made this clearer in the spirit of ELI5... a more thorough explanation: A speaker moves inside a fixed housing (a “cabinet” or “bookshelf speaker” or an old tv or a new tv) that physically pushes air with its movements (which is why bigger speakers generate bigger bass... more surface area, more air to push over a deeper distance = more bass ). With new, modern flat-screen TVs, the picture quality is dramatically improved but the actual space to house decent sized speakers is way smaller in terms of width and importantly depth. If the speaker “pumps” sound, it can’t pump much if it can’t move back and forth in its housing very far. Now, even though audio engineering has gotten pretty unreal impressive, TVs get slimmer and slimmer AND they still get loud. The thing is that they get “shrill” too. It’s harder to distinguish really low sounds (they all blend together and sound “boomy” like you’re under water) from one another, and with high sounds in particular, they are hard to distinguish. When you push incoming signal (the audio data transmitted from the movie or show) up to its highest limits (aka turning up the volume), it starts to distort. If you’ve ever played a song you love out of laptop speakers or, especially, phone speakers and heard it break up when it’s at its loudest, listen more carefully and you’ll hear what gets cut: bass and treble. On newer TVs, it’s the same thing. You don’t notice this in ambient scenes with music or something, but in quieter ones with precise dialogue it becomes hard to distinguish voices that are higher in the mix (compared to bass-y car crashes and explosions) and precise. Add to these hardware issues what lots of commenters have mentioned regarding mixing issues, and it’s hard to wrangle with modern in-tv speakers. Btw the sound FIDELITY of older TVs was not often as good because the signal capacity wasn’t as high quality (and more often than not it was analog), but because the speakers were larger and in a bigger housing, they could process a much “rounder” sound spectrum that afforded more nuance. It’s not just size, obviously... it’s also signal and equipment and movie, etc. not to mention settings and speakers and maker and model and on and on forever, but you get the idea.",
"Dynamic range. Like in an orchestra. Super softs pianísimos and loud fortes. It’s about exacerbating emotions. With good speakers or headphones is very effective. Like in a movie theater.",
"Fun but annoying fact. There is a decibel limit to how loud you can make your ad. Ad agencies believe the louder the better which is why your commercials come blasting in 10x louder than your show",
"What's interesting is the fine folk at /r/hometheater actually get frustrated that the audio in modern movies is too \"balanced\" between loud and soft, at the cost of not really showing off a great mix like you get in the movie theater. And most movies do get a remix for home release. It's a balancing act, the people mixing movies for home release have to account for a $20k+ home theater, my $1k 5.1 system, people with a sound bar, and those poor, poor souls using the tv's built in speakers. No way to make everyone happy. When I edit my videos, I'm ususally listening on my studio monitors or really good headphones. But I also give a listen before I am done on some Apple earbuds or computer speakers. Gotta make sure it works in all situations. It's really tough!",
"To add to the top comment, you probably notice this the most when both are happening simultaneously. If you are just using the sound from the built-in TV speakers, this is especially atrocious. Since the dialogue audio is typically placed in the center and music is placed left and right, a TV’s crap speaker(s) lacks the ability to recreate the audio field. Speakers in TVs have actually gotten worse over time as the screen quality has improved. Aside from not really being able to fit decent speakers in TVs that are so flat these days, I theorize it’s a way to get people to buy soundbars that they wouldn’t have otherwise. THAT SAID, I have a 5.1 surround system at home, and even I’ve had to manually boost the dedicated center speaker a couple decibels to compensate for poorly mixed audio.",
"Movies are mixed in very large rooms, to mirror the size of a movie theater. Air is a natural compressor of sound, so big rooms = lots of air = lots of natural air compression (tighter dynamic range). When you reduce the size of the room (down to a living room), remove the distance between the speakers and your ears, and the air in your room, the louds are louder and the quiets seem quieter. Plus, this content is mixed without regard to having judgy apartment neighbors or toddlers you’re trying to not wake up. Should there be a separate “home/tighter dynamic range mix” that you can switch to? Yes, but studios are too cheap to pay for this. Source: I’m a sound designer/mixer for this type of stuff. [I also make a podcast all about sound factoids.]( URL_0 )",
"Ok actual Re-Recording Mixer for Broadcast & Streaming TV here. Most answers here aren’t really correct. As people mentioned, dialogue lives in the center channel & music & SFX live in 5.1. Yes, we absolutely mix in 5.1 for people watching at home on their headphones, laptop speakers, TV speakers, sound bars, and serious 5.1 home theater setups. I’m gonna ignore atmos for now, but some similar dynamics apply. Also please excuse any formatting errors or typos since I’m on mobile! There are 3 main issues. The first, as I mentioned above, everyone at home is listening not only on very different sets of speakers, but in very different listening environments. There’s a washing machine running behind you, your kid is yelling, etc. You simply can’t account for everything. Someone mentioned that services and/or hardware should just have a setting that levels everything out. Some home sound bars have something kinda similar...mine has something called Uni Volume. Go ahead and give it a try. It sucks. You’ll hear a ton of compression & gating on the dialogue, which hurts intelligibility and defeats its own purpose. The main issue comes with creating a stereo (2 channel) mix from a 5.1 (6 channel) mix. I promise you, if you measure with sound meters, the dialogue is most often much louder than the music. BUT take 6 channels and squeeze them down into 2 channels...no matter how good your fold down algorithm, the relative dynamics will always make the music seem louder in stereo. We try the avoid this in a lot of different ways when mixing a show (hence the term “mix”), but arguably the most important way is this: we’ll finalize a mix by playing back on small, crappy TV speakers. There’s no way to account for every speaker, but most mixers genuinely want their big ol’ 5.1 mix to translate well to a little TV. Finally, the last issue is operator error. Some mixers either don’t know or don’t care. There are hacks everywhere. Also big movies go through a remix specifically to fix this translation error on TV (it’s called a nearfield mix), and even I find myself critical of the dialogue/music balance when watching some films at home. People make mistakes. And sometimes they just done care. Just make sure if you find yourself watching a show & fully immersed in the world, not reaching for lines of dialogue, that you take a lil moment to appreciate what went on behind the scenes."
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hxh2ee | Why does the cursor on the screen get boxed by two sides but can leave from the other two sides? What's the reason behind this design? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn’t, it just seems like it does. The curser, when using the generic arrow, points towards the top left of the screen. So when you move the curser to the left or top of the screen the very top of the arrow is touching the edge pixels so you can click on them. When you move the curser to the right or bottom of the screen, the very tip of the arrow is still touching the edge pixels, however the rest of the curser arrow is now off screen and you cannot see it.",
"Ultimately the mouse occupies a single pixel on your screen, but one pixel is much too small to be practical for a cursor. To get around that limitation an arrow is used. This arrow could have been set up to come in from any direction. Having the cursor point up and to the left helps keep the image of the cursor out of the way of whatever you're clicking on. This means that the entire graphic for the cursor is below and to the right of the one single pixel that it's pointing at. When you point at the bottom row of pixels on your screen the entire graphic is off the screen, while if you point at the top row the entire image is on the screen. Same with right/left. If you instead used a cursor that was a crosshair that extends above, below, left, and right of the single pixel the mouse is occupying then you'd be able to get the graphic halfway off the screen on each edge, or 75% off the screen in any corner."
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hxi5f5 | In astronomy how are pictures of colourful galaxies and nebulae taken? | Do they really look like that or are the colours artificially edited in? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally speaking the images we see are “false color” but you could also say they’re enhanced or exaggerated. It’s not that the colors aren’t there, but rather most of them are muted. You and I wouldn’t see them that way, at least not from earth. In essence cameras are much better at detecting light than we are. Certain wavelengths are basically “black” to us, such as really deep reds in space. Then there’s light beyond what we can even register with our eyes; cameras can see that too. So we reconstruct the image based on what the camera says, but convert it to something we can see. So the light really is there, but it’s not necessarily something we’d see. The cameras don't always take full color photos though. Sometimes it's black and white, sometimes it's IR, sometimes it's UV, and sometimes it's a blend. The full image you see it constructed based on all the available information; whatever light readings we do have *and* our understanding of the makeup of the object. A nebula might be a black-and-white image but have a known chemical makeup and we can infer colors based on that. #ELI5 Imagine you have a paint-by-numbers kit. Except the kit contains five paints, and there are 10 numbers. They forgot to include 5 paints. However the paints they forgot were different shades of the colors you do have. So when it calls for \"Red 1\" you use red. When it calls for \"Red 2\" you still use red. Even though you only have 5 paints (limited color vision) you can still sort of make the image work by translating the paints you don't have (colors you can't see) into the paints you do have (colors you can see). The end result isn't what the artist intended (what it actually looks like) but it's still something you can enjoy and understand. Sometimes you get a paint by numbers kit, though, that doesn't tell you which color to use. It gives you colors and then tells you what each type of thing should look like. It doesn't say \"this part is red\" it says \"all iron is reddish\" and so you just have to sort of fill in the blanks using a little creativity."
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hxjjld | Whats the difference between CPU and GPU and how do they work ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A CPU, central processing unit, a general processor made to perform many computational tasks. A GPU, graphics processing unit, is a processor dedicated to performing the specific kind of computation that displays graphics. The CPU is like a committee of Maths PhDs. They know a lot, but take a while to get anything done. The GPU is like a colony of a billion leaf cutter ants. They only know how to do one thing - move leaves - but damn do they do it fast."
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hxl3if | what is IP sniffing ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Inside of wires that connect almost EVERY computer in the world, you have a whole bunch of little letters (packets) that are being sent between the computers. These letters have (IP) addresses of where they came from and where they need to go so that the people who deliver those letters (routers) know where they go and the computer that gets it can send a message back if it needs to. Sometimes people like to look in the wire and just see the information in those letters. A lot of times it's harmless people and students trying to learn more, but sometimes it's bad people. Sometimes those bad people want to steal those addresses and use them in a mean way. Sometimes they might take the letter so that they can send a message back pretending to be the computer."
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hxmpha | How do ad blockers work ? How do they identify ads from elements in a website | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly by identifying URL patterns and bits of JavaScript they can intercept. The ads on your browser call for images and scripts and other content in ways that the ad blockers have been written to recognize. When the browser tries to use the URL or script, the ad blocker intercepts the request or changes the script to request something else. The patterns and URLs are recognized and curated over time. It can be as easy as seeing “ URL_0 ” or “/ad/“ in the URL. It can be a little more complex like recognizing tracking elements that should be unique to each browser or user. It shows the awesome power of web scripting, and how easy it is to garner any information from the browser content and traffic."
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hxn9js | why after signing into some websites a screen will say "you will be redirected in 5 seconds," why not just redirect immediately and not show this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually there are some safety checks happening in the background and instedad of showing nothing it displays this message. Also sometimes this is a feature to defend against brute force attacks as it makes you wait everytime.",
"If you're talking about corporate systems, often after you have submitted your login details, you are brought to a login authentication page that checks you're login credentials. If unsuccessful, you are returned to the login page. If successful, you are forwarded to the server which hosts the content (yup, the authentication sometimes happens on a different server). Why redirect instead of sending you directly to the target page? 1. Sometimes it is sending you to an outdated link which the target server intercepts to bring you to the right page 2. Sometimes the actual request contains additional information in the URL and a redirect is used to hide it 3. Sometimes it may simply be server policy for outgoing links",
"The message is to give users some indication that they're waiting for something. The page sends the request to the server, the server needs to process it (and sometimes load the user profile) and then sends a message back to the page indicating whether or not the login was successful. The \"5 seconds\" is actually arbitrary, it could be 1ms or even 1 minute if there's high traffic/congestion."
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hxoejg | Why do mobile game advertisers use footage of a game not even remotely similar to the actual game? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's much easier to make fake gameplay that looks cool, than to actually make the game. When people download it, they may be annoyed, but they may also play a little bit to see if the game they were promised starts soon or something like that. And the actual game, while not that exciting to look at, is usually pretty addictive so enough people keep playing (and paying microtransactions) to make the game a success."
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hxstkf | How do transistors work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The input and output of a transistor are separated by semi-conducting material. In it's normal state, it does not conduct, so electricity cannot flow from the input to output. But when you apply a voltage to the semi-conducting material, it becomes conductive and allows electricity to flow from the input to output."
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hxt496 | Do GPUs perform better after “warming up” - similar to a car engine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The game has to load up in your VRAM; it's not literally quite the same as \"warming up\". But there is a load period.",
"This probably also not purely a GPU thing. Games contain a lot of data, most of it compressed while on your HDD/SDD. And to not annoy you with a multiple minute loading screen they try to load stuff on the fly as late as possible. That can lead to small stutters etc. until eventually almost everything is loaded and it can just pull assets from RAM instead of from storage. Essentially the same reason why starting multiple programs right after booting a PC will take longer and be more \"stuttery\" than once it has been running for a while.",
"Engines need it warm up because combustion requires heat, there is a sweet spot where they run best. It is my understanding that electronics loose performance as they heat up."
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hxtsj7 | If CPU Chips are built for the same socket (AM4) how are they made at different qualities? i.e, what is different about the Ryzen 9 3950x that makes it perform better than a Ryzen 5 3600, even though visually they look the same? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think of it like any other product. You can buy a Ford Mustang with a 4 cylinder, 6 cylinder, or 8 cylinder engine. From the outside, they look the same. Same fenders, same wheels, if you went Badge delete they would be virtually identical. But under the hood… whoa boy, there’s a difference. With processors, just because they plug into the same socket doesn’t mean they have the same transistor layout. Another analogy is the electrical outlet in your house. You can plug in a vacuum, or a toaster, or a fish tank pump, or a floor lamp, or a table saw, or any number of electrical appliances, but isn’t it just the same old socket?",
"the socket has nothing to do with how a cpu performs. the architecture of a cpu is what makes it different (usually), from generation to generation. but the difference is the thread, core-count, and or clock-speed. the higher the core amount, usually the better. with a higher clock speed the better each of those cores perform. the threads carry out the process of the cores. so what makes the Ryzen 9 3950x better? the core and thread count. but to a certain extent. it depends on what you do with the computer as well. you need more cores for video editing, video streaming, modeling, blender etc. but if you were gaming on a Ryzen 9 3950x vs the 3600, it would only be minimally better because most games can’t even utilize the amount of cores the 3950x has.",
"In addition to what others have said, I will say that your assertion that they \"visually look the same\" is absolute bunk. Maybe to the naked eye, they look the same, but at microscopic levels, those 2 processors look wildly different in terms of architecture."
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hxttly | What's the difference between active and passive radar jamming? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Radar is basically a well tuned microphone that listens to how sound rebounds from whatever it sends an initial burst of sound at. An active jammer is 'screaming' at the microphone, and tries to mask the sound that it seeks. A passive jammer is more to do with construction of the target, by using specific shapes and materials it tries to minimise the sound that can bounce back to the microphone.",
"I believe that \"Passive radar jamming\" means things like chaff. Things that absorb and reflect, but do not transmit. \"Active radar jamming\" means things like [BriteCloud]( URL_0 ) that absorb, reflect, and also transmit."
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hxwady | Why are most modern cars FWD(Front Wheel Drive)? Aside from the AWD cars. | Why.. Specifically rather than RWD?? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Having an engine with FWD is easier to assemble and mount in the car since it's a single module. Not having a drive train in the center of the car means they don't need a hump so there's more interior room. Having the weight on the front drive wheels gives more traction and better braking at regular driving speeds, so it's safer.",
"FWD cars are generally safer cars giving the driver more control in adverse road conditions(snow, rain, gravel) so the car is less likely to fishtail. RWD cars were more popular because they were cheaper to assemble when the CV-joint was a very expensive and complex component. As others have mentioned FWD are cheaper now because it is the manual labor that is the expensive component now and the CV-joint is no longer novel technology."
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hxxwad | How do chess programs simulate playing at different levels? | In other words, how does my chess app know what a novice, intermediate, or advanced player would do at a given point during a match? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The simple answer is they really don't know what their opponent will do, nor can they predict it. What the programmer can do, however, is adjust how many moves ahead the computer can \"think\" and have it select the moves that grant the greatest number of win states. So if you move your Queen forward three spaces, in the few moments of time between you locking in your move, and the computer moving to block your Queen (for example), it has looked at your possible moves that include your obvious \"next move equals Checkmate\" to you opting to move a random pawn for no reason. It then looks at how it could respond to each and every choice you might make and determined that the move with more \"wins\" for it involve blocking your Queen. To put it another way, if you've seen 'Avengers: Infinity War' the Computer basically does the Dr Strange thing and looks at the 14 Billion possible futures, and in only one of them does the computer win, so that's the move it makes. If the computer is to be virtually unbeatable, it can be permitted to look at every possible variation on the game at hand (of which there is a huge, but still finite number) and stick to moves that equal wins. Alternatively a 'Novice' AI might only be allowed to see one or two moves ahead, or maybe just be forced to move pieces at random. Of course, with advances in AI technology it's entirely possible to have the Computer \"learn\" from its opponent and make predictions based on that. However while these exist to a certain degree, the majority of Chess AI that you find online will fall into the above explanation.",
"There are many different approaches to this. I'll show a few different strategies for the advanced bot and how it could be dumbed down. Each of these could be used in parallel or not at all. A good chess player is thinking many moves ahead. An advanced bot my have an idea of the next 6 moves, the easy one may only consider the next move. Until nearly the end of the game, there is rarely a perfectly right move. Generally the computer will think about many possible moves and choose the best, either based on probabilities or learned models. An advanced bot will calculate the best moves and pick the highest strategically ranked move. An intermediate bot might randomly pick between the top 5 moves. Even that can be tweaked at what probability it picks between the top 5 moves-- an easier bot might be more likely to pick the worst of the top 5 more often. There are also bad moves, e.g. moves that a good player would know to avoid. Sometimes these are traps that are intentionally set, sometimes its just bad luck or moves that don't help anything. An easy bot might intentionally fall for traps or pick a bad move more often. Another possibility is for an advanced bot to \"think longer\" than an easy bot. The advanced bot might consider every single piece it has on every turn to determine a best move, whereas an easy bot might only consider pieces near the piece you just moved. Yet another option depends on how the bot works. Some use machine learning and are trained against millions of recorded chess matches to predictively model what a game looks like. Others use heuristic algorithms (using approximations and guesses) to make good moves. A trained bot can intentionally pick bad moves to appear dumb, a heuristic bot might make wilder guesses There's all kinds of combinations of these strategies and some make for more realistic easy competitors, some make for chaotic unrealistic competitors. I'd guess every chess simulator does it differently"
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hxy71w | Wireless phone charging | I just can't wrap my head around it. How is the transfer in energy occuring when there's no direct connection? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electricity moves around and creates magnetic fields, and can wiggle physical stuff. The opposite is also true, magnets wiggling around can create electricity. It's just a to b to a again, with some loss in between.",
"Hard to do like you are 5 but I'll try Magnets You take a magnet and it attracts another even though they don't touch A wireless charger basically makes a magnetic field which makes the magnets inside the device you are charging charge the device. They don't physically attract each other. But the magnetic field moves the electrons in a way that charges",
"Magnetism. If you push electricity through a wire, it makes the wire act like a moving magnet. If you move a magnet near a wire, it makes electricity. So - if you push electricty through a wire, near another wire, the first wire acts like a moving magnet, and that makes electricity in the second wire. For wireless charging, the first wire is in the charger, and the second wire is in your phone. Pushing electricity through the wire in the charger makes a magnetic field that makes electricity move in a wire in your phone. And you use that electricity to recharge the battery."
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hy8kcx | Why are camera lenses always circular? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Camera lenses are not perfect. They don't focus all light colors the same way. You get tiny rainbow effects on your photo. The further from the center light goes through, the bigger the flaws. A circle is the ~~optional~~optimal shape with no corner outlier points further away from the center. Google Chromatic Aberration and look at images to see examples of what happens at the edge of a lense.",
"Imagine a sheet of cardboard with a small hole in it. Now take a long two-ended pencil and push it through the hole, so that say 80% of the pencil's length is on one side, and 20% is on the other side. If you draw something with the long end, the short end of the pencil will also move, and it will replicate what you drew, but smaller, and up-side down. This is the basic working principle of a lens. The pencil is light the rays of light, and the hole is like the lens (you can actually replace a lens with a hole and it will work similarly). You want the hole to be circular in order for your movements to be replicated accurately. If the hole was a square, the pencil would wobble diagonally but not vertically or horizontally, and it would make your image more blurry when drawing diagonal lines. A circle allows all movements to be treated equally regardless of direction. There are non-spherical lenses actually, these are called anamorphic lenses. They distort the image and stretch it vertically or horizontally. They're used in cinema to fit a widescreen image onto a non-widescreen camera sensor or film. Once recorded, they are played back with another anamorphic lens that de-squeezes the image so that it can be projected onto a wide screen. Nowadays of course the projection is done digitally, but anamorphic lenses are still very much used on cameras, mostly because it looks cool.",
"This is extremely hard to ELI5, but the short answer is that corners introduce a lot of aberrations, edge refrations, and internal reflections. Typically, people figured this out experimentally before we were able to define lenses mathematically. Circular lenses just work better for general purpose uses. Circular lenses also make the math a lot simpler. The mutli-variate calculus used to define and study a lens gets much simpler if you specify radial symmetry and use polar coordinates. Then you only have to sweat a single variable - radius - rather than trying to solve the same equations over X and Y (Cartesian) coordinate space. When studying lenses students occasionally solve for decentered or non-circular lens systems. Usually, this is done by throwing the numbers into a computer and asking for a solution through a lot of trial iterations, because they're so painful to solve algebrarically."
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hyb7ue | Why wasn't Luigi found in Super Mario 64 until the source code was leaked? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The leak included a beta prototype version of the game. These files were successfully scrubbed by Nintendo before the games original release, so they weren't in the release version of the game to be data-mined."
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hyegou | . How does game source code get lost? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What it comes down to is bad data management. The code has to be stored somewhere and if that storage device is compromised and no backups exist, then you're going to lose that data permanently.",
"The code on a disc isn't the same as the source code. On disc, a lot of the written code has been translated into machine code (1s and 0s), and is extremely difficult to reverse engineer because not only is the code written in simple one step instructions, but there is no longer an order or organization of where the code does what. What they meant by losing the source code is that they lost the uncompiled code, stuff written in C, C++, Java or w/e else. Stuff that can be read and easily understood by people."
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hyfxnk | What is a “backdoor” in terms of security in software programs, onions sites, and internet connections, and what do they look like? | I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about wanting about backdoors into your phone, a website on the deepweb, and software programs but so don’t understand what a backdoor is, why it isn’t findable to someone trying to “open” it, how it’s hidden when it exists, and why it looks like. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically, it is a way past all your normal defenses on a device(phone, computer, whatever). Say you have your phone need a finger print from your hand to unlock it. A backdoor would be a piece of code(intentional or not) which would allow anyone with the proper knowledge to bypass the finger print lock. Often they are difficult to find and open because they are hidden in such a way that you can't see how to access them without looking at the underlying code(something you can't normally do with most programs) and the password may be much more complex than a standard password would be. None of this means they are impossible to discover and open. In layman's terms a programming backdoor it a hidden hatch to get into your car without unlocking the door that only the manufacturer is supposed to know about/be able to open. They are dangerous because it potentially means anyone could open your phone and you would never know they did it.",
"It's like the extra keyhole on TSA compliant luggage in the US: there's a way the user can get in (your unique key) and another way that the lock can be bypassed (the TSA key). Software backdoors are ways that allow bypassing the user's normal way of getting in (your unique key e.g. a password). In theory this lets users be protected from other users while some overseeing agent has a way in to assist as needed. In practice they suffer from the same flawed assumption as the TSA locks: that only the TSA has a copy of that key. Backdoors are inherently dangerous for this reason. You may recall a case in the US where the FBI was trying to get apple to create a backdoor in iOS so they could get at the contents of the device, but the problem is once a backdoor exists there's no way to ensure only those who should have access do, and that they do so in a moral way."
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hyh9l1 | why do records run specifically with 33rpm or 45rpm, and very early records ran with 78rpm, which is the sum of 33 and 45? Who decided 78 was the right amount of rpm and why split is it the sum of the other two speeds? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"78 being a sum is pure coincidence. Here is the breakdown on the speeds per [Victrola.]( URL_0 ) \"The first iteration of the vinyl record player found its speed somewhat by accident. Since the original phonograph machines were hand-cranked, there was a push among inventors from the early years of widespread use to find an automatic solution to spinning the record. Although there are differing accounts as to exactly how the process unfolded, the end result was a machine that turned records at 78 revolutions per minute. As the new machine became more popular, its limitations became only more apparent. Spinning the disc record at 78 rpm’s (also known as revolutions or rotations per minute) means that a 12-inch disc can only hold between four and five minutes of music. This meant that classical music and popular Broadway tunes could not be played in their entirety without flipping or changing discs. As a result, there developed over the following decades a race to discover and popularize a slower-spinning machine. The challenge was that records could only be spun so slowly before there occurred a drop in audio quality. The question then became settling on the right balance between the machine being fast enough to sound good but slow enough to store more music on the disc. The result was two competing speeds, 45 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm. Since there was now a situation where three different speeds were present in the market, it became necessary to distinguish between them, leading to the formats we currently have today. Records today can be found in the following formats, designated by their speed: 78s – primarily records produced before 1955 45s – primarily used for 7” discs carrying singles or “EPs” 33 1/3 – primarily used for long format “LPs” (albums) Others – 16 and 8, rarely used but occasionally for spoken word recordings 78 Although stories about the development of the first automatic phonograph machine tend to differ, it is generally accepted that the speed was an accident. Likely because the motor placed inside the machine happened to operate at a speed of 78 rpm’s, phonographs were standardized at that rate, and recordings were optimized to that speed. Early records were made of Shellac, a wax material that predated the later vinyl versions. Sizes were generally 10” or 12”. Read more in our related blog post about how a vinyl record is made. The fact that each side of a disc was only able to carry between three and five minutes of music created an obvious limitation that eventually led to the demise of the 78. By 1955, production had all but ceased in this format, to be replaced by longer formats. While 78s did continue to be pressed in isolated instances, today they are mainly to be found only in antique form. 45 By the mid-1940s, competition sprung up between longer formats looking to displace the 78. One of these longer formats was the 45. Although the slower spin speed meant that more music could be recorded onto a 12” disc, the 45 became the format of choice for singles and EP (“extended play”) releases. Artists would release 7” 45s carrying a signature tune to be played either on the radio or in jukeboxes, and this became its primary use. It’s somewhat rare to find full LP’s released in 45, but they do exist in some cases. There are groups of audiophiles who swear that the 45 brings with it superior sound quality in comparison to the slower 33 1/3. As a result, some artists will put out special releases of their albums in 45 formats. A general rule, however, is that the 45 is primarily the domain of the single and the EP. 33 1/3 The third common format for vinyl records is the 33 1/3. After its release in the 1940s, around the same time as the 45, the 33 1/3 quickly became the format of choice for LP (or “long playing,” full album) pressings. Since the run time per side for a 12” disc usually comes to around 22 minutes, the 33 1/3 quickly became the ideal choice for classical music and Broadway tunes that the 78 and 45 couldn’t support so readily. As the LP became more popular among recording artists, so too did the 33 1/3 format. Today, almost all vinyl records that you will encounter in record stores and large commercial retailers are 12” 33 1/3 pressings. As the standard for album releases and record companies, the 33 1/3 became ubiquitous after the 1950s, and if you encounter a vinyl turntable that doesn’t have an adjustable speed switch, it’s most likely fixed to this format. Others – 16 and 8 It is possible that in rare cases you may encounter records that are designed to be played in a format other than 78, 45, or 33 1/3. 16 and 8 rpm formats have been used in some instances for spoken word recordings, since they’re capable of holding additional material. However, a loss of audio quality does occur with these formats, so it is almost unheard of to find 16 or 8 records with songs and music on them. It is also worth noting that many of today’s turntables are unable to play at speeds slower than 33 1/3. If you own a 16 or 8 record and are looking for a player, it is recommended that you check specifically to find one that is capable of playing in these formats.\"",
"Records started out with more than one speed. Several manufacturers tried to have unique speeds that would require records that only they sold. (Much like printers and razors today) But RCA Victor quickly dominated the market with their 78 rpm design because in addition to having their own branded music, they allowed others to also make records for that speed. That speed was chosen because of limitations of the technology. The first record players (gramophones) were spring powered and had only the big tuba shaped horn to provide amplification of the signal. That meant to be loud, you had to have a track that moved the needle a lot. This takes up more space on the disk, reducing the maximum length of audio you could capture. And, at the same time, the smaller the wiggles in the record you can create, the better the audio quality, a factor which pushes towards faster speeds. The creators assumed that opera and classical works would be the highest demand, so they created a record size and speed that would hold the sort of long tracks found in those genres. (A similar story exists behind the creation of the modern CD) However, popular music turned out to be the big winner in sales. The existing standard could hold an entire album of music. But many creators of pop music had come from music hall and vaudeville backgrounds, where songs were created more individually. In order to sell those individual songs, the single was created. Once reliable electric motors with very consistent speed and electrical amplification was available, tracks could be cut more narrow to take up less disk space. The new technology allowed for a smaller, slower turning disk to hold just as much audio as the old 78s. Record player makers knew that while people would happily buy into the new, better sounding record tech, there was still a huge base of 78s out there. To cope with that, they created players that played at 33 or 78 using a gear or moving a belt to a different pulley. A bit later, 45 was added by adding another pulley. Today, record players typically change speeds using electronic speed control to adjust the motor speed directly.",
"Isn't that top answer just saying \"all of these different speeds exist\" in a very long walk of text that doesn't even address the question? The only thing addressing the question is the guy saying it was a coincidence which was uncited",
"The fact that 78=45+33 is pure coincidence (and only really works if you ignore that vinyl albums run at 33 1/3 RPM, not 33). As for who decides on the speed: engineers. The general rule of thumb for analogue music formats is \"the faster the speed, the better the quality\". That's true for tapes, wires, disks, cylinders, etc. Of course, faster speed also means lower capacity. So it's up to the engineers that come up with the format to find the lowest possible speed at which the quality is still satisfactory, which depends on a huge number of factors, like the medium itself, recording methods, playback technology, customer expectations and so on. Columbia decided 33 1/3 RPM was the sweet spot for their records, RCA Victor decided on 45 RPM. (Although, with that said, it's also very likely that RCA just deliberately wanted to make their format incompatible with early 33 RPM players, which didn't have speed select yet). [Techmoan ]( URL_0 )has a great video about record formats. His channel is also an amazing source for anything you could ever want to know about audio formats.",
"Check out Techmoan on youtube. Here's a [40 min video]( URL_0 ) about vinyl playing speeds and how they developed. If you're interested in some kind of obscure audio format or audio device, he probably has made a video about it. One of my favorite channels on youtube",
"so little story, I bought a Fleetwood Mac record, brand new greatest hits collection, i listened to this thing for 2 years trying to figure out if i had gotten some special edition where everything was sang by Lindsey Buckingham or something because all the songs were really deep voiced and a bit slower than you usually hear them, anyways one day I'm listening to it and my wife is looking at the sleeve and she's like \"do you have the record player at 45rpm?\" I'm like no its a regular sized record its supposed to be at 33rpm? she points to a small \"45rpm\" label on the sleeve, i switch the record player and boom it sounds normal, not gonna lie though, i kinda liked Stevie nicks at 33rpm lol TL;DR: listened to what I thought was a 33rpm record for years when it was a 45",
"On a side note: The sound quality of records decreases as the stylus travels toward the center.",
"If it's spinning at the same constant angular velocity but the needle is also moving inward as it plays, won't it have to ~~slow down~~ speed up (~~less~~ more rpm) to maintain the same linear speed, or is the data recorded more sparsely as you draw closer to the center?",
"To add, the RIAA came up with an EQ standard that reduced the highs and lows when cutting the master. Too much low end and the needle bounces, too much top end and teh needle can't follow it. So the solution was to reduce top and bottom when cutting, then restore it during playback - that is why stereo systems have a \"phono in\" input - Not only to add amplification for the low output stylus but to re- EQ the top and bottom back to normal. So therefore, with the RIAA curve it became possible to cut the grooves closer together and have more play time per side."
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hyjl4d | Where is the data in the internet actually stored? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On a drive. In someone's computer. All of internet is computed and stored on some companies or some government's physical computer in a building somewhere"
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hyk45n | Do planes need co-pilots or is it purely a safety mechanism if something should happen to the first pilot? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on the plane. Some planes need two sets of hands to flip all the switches and control the plane. In most cases, the copilot runs checklists and assists the pilot. The pilot could make do without the copilot, but it's a lot easier with them there to share the workload, and catch any mistakes",
"A lot of things happen when routine landing. It helps to have another person handle some stuff while the pilot is flying. Suppose you need to change radio frequency. Are you the pilot going to take your eyes off instruments and turn the dials to get the right frequency or would you rather have someone else do it. And when things aren't routine, it definitely helps to have a second person.",
"Flying big planes is complicated and having an extra set of eyes and ears is considered essential. One pilot is considered \"flying\" and responsible for controlling the plane even if it's being flown by the autopilot. The other pilot is considered \"monitoring\" and will handle the radio and keep an eye out for problems, make sure the other pilot doesn't make mistakes, etc. When a mistake can result in hundreds of deaths it's not just \"in case of medical emergency\" that we have 2 pilots. In case of emergency typically one pilot will take control of the plane while the other runs through the procedures for the situation. You don't want one pilot dealing with the radio, flying the plane, and running through the checklist at the same time.",
"There is also some element of training, that way the co pilot has some years of experience before moving into the left seat to be a captain. & #x200B; And of course if a pilot should be incapacitated it helps if there is a 2nd person there"
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hykq96 | Is there a way to make an "universal application" that can run in any and all OS's? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Web based applications fill this role currently, since the code is standardized to run in any web browser it can run on any OS. Different OSs are too different to have a universal application, you need to have an intermediary like Java or a Web Browser to handle all the OS specific things.",
"No. As in the other answers, and in your example, the closest thing that we have is something that requires another (OS-specific) application being installed first - whether that's Java, Python, or a web browser.",
"There are a variety of interpreted or microcode languages such as Python that will run on any platform they've been implemented on. These languages are platform independent because they're essentially just a scripting language running in an application that handles all of the OS/hardware access. However, almost anything that needs serious performance needs to be written in a platform-specific manner and then called from such languages."
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hynhq6 | What does DirectX12 do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"DirectX is an API, wich basically means that some nice programmer made some instruction that could be usefull to everyone that want to interact with something (in this case the graphic card) and put them together in a nice packet Let's say you want to draw a line on your screen, with directX you can just say DrawALinePlease(from a to b) and it will draw a line there If you don't use direct x you would have to say, \"draw this pixel here, then another here, another here...\" until you get the result you want More specifically DirectX 12 add the possibility to have multiple GPU, a bunch of speed improvements and most importantly add the possibility to program ray tracing with it",
"DirectX is a Programming interface for graphics, that speaks with the graphics card. This way a programmer only needs to program something, that can speak one version of DirectX that the graphics card supports instead of speaking the language of every single graphics card or graphics driver out there. The actual translation from DirectX to Hardware is done by the graphics drivers, but the graphics card needs to support the features of DirectX, so the driver can translate. You can view it that way: NVIDIA-drivers speak Italian, AMD-drivers speak German and Intel-Drivers speak Spanish. Each individual graphics card speaks a dialect of their respective driver languages. It is hard to program, if you need to speak 3 different languages, so the drivers all speak a different language called English. That is DX in our case. So the program only needs to speak a dialect of English, that gets translated to let’s say German and the driver translates it to Saxon. DirectX 12 is the current version of DirectX. It supports features that either weren’t available previously or that only were available with calculation intensive workarounds. So programs that run DX12 run faster or utilise features that previous versions of DX didn’t have. You can view that in our analogy as words that exist in one language but don’t have a direct translation in another language. There is this new thing called cellphone defined in DX12. No program uses it yet and no driver knows what it is yet. But the developers start to implement it and a little while later the AMD-driver (german) knows, that a cellphone means Handy. Their graphics cards don’t support it yet, so the find a long and complicated workaround for the old Radeon Vega VII (Saxon) called „deure Zeidfaschwendüng“, but in the next graphics card they know they need a „word“ for that, so they hardcode „Handy“ into the newest GPU."
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hynwc3 | Why does OneDrive not allow charakters like * : < > ? / \ | ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because these are special characters that are forbidden in certain file systems, such as NTFS and FAT. Why are they forbidden? Because they have special meanings. For example, ':' is a drive specifier, \\ and / are folder seperators, ? and * are wildcard characters (when searching for files) and so on. See full list [here]( URL_0 ).",
"Because those characters are being used by the underlying computer to store and process the information. One example: the backslash character **\\** is used to layout the folder structure. So, if you have a music folder and a pictures folder with a couple files in each, you might see a picture of a folder that you click on, but the computer would actually see them like this: \\music\\song1.mp3 \\music\\song2.mp3 \\pics\\image1.png \\pics\\imaeg2.png If you tried to name your song like \"song\\1\", the computer would interpret that as a folder called song with a file inside of it called 1. The other symbols have other purposes, but it all revolves around how the computer process and stores information."
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hypn16 | why do you need graphic cards to do complex mathematical equations like the ones used in mining bitcoins. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You don't *need* a graphics card, you can do it with your CPU. But GPUs are specialized at doing a lot of mathematical computations in parallel, which is good for graphics, and also for cryptocurrency mining.",
"graphics cards are really, really good at running highly repetitive algorithms, which a lot of cryptocurrency mining algorithms fall under. they’re good at this because rendering graphics tends to be a lot of really repetitive math itself, so the mining software just repurposes that functionality of the chip to mine cryptocurrency instead. your CPU isn’t as good as running highly repetitive algorithms, instead it’s good at solving fewer, but much more complicated problems. since the cryptocurrency mining algorithms aren’t able to take advantage of that, your CPU is at a disadvantage compared to a graphics card."
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hyqa65 | What is the difference between front end and back end development? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Front-end is essentially what you see when you open a website or app along with the interactivity. Back-end is everything that runs behind the scenes to make the front-end operational. Taking reddit as an example, the front-end is the app (or the website if you use that) you use that lets you see and create posts/comments whereas the back-end is the database/server that stores all of the information about each post and comment.",
"front end = what gets executed on the user's browser back end = what gets executed on the server before the result is sent to the user's browser",
"Front end is like going to a concert with general admission tickets and back end is like having backstage passes and getting to see how chaotic everything is to make the show go off smooth"
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hysinh | Why does a CPU need so many transistors? | A simple CPU has some registers, an ALU and a control unit. Modern processors have a way more complex architecture of course (Specialized processing units like vector processing, probably a larger instruction set, cache..) , but afaik a modern CPU still works the same, like there is still one (or maybe 2 or three) ALU's. But how does that add up to a transistor count 1000000 times the one of a CPU from the 70's? At which part of a modern CPU, the main share of these 1e9 Transistors are built in? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A couple of things. But generally modern processors do things in a much more complex way to boost performance. Some features they have that old CPUs didn't have are. 1. Branch prediction, they guess at what the next instruction is, and start work on it before it happens. 2. Due to branch prediction, when they are wrong they undo the work they just did. 3. They have pipelines, so they actually handle multiple instructions per cycle, while still taking multiple cycles per instruction. 4. To do that, they need multiple copies of registers, and multiple copies of things like ALUs that get loaded with the bits that need to be done. 5. To support all of the above, they actually read in predicted instructions, and decode them to microde operations, and then sort those operations and optimize them so they get fed into the different units in a better order. 6. They support much more complicated instructions, to encode more operations in less instructions. 7. And finally, they have many more cores and cache, largely this means they duplicate everything to get more processing power."
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hysl9x | How cookies work on the internet | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A cookie is just a small file that gets stored on your device. It has some information about \"you\" that may make your browsing experience easier. It can serve several purposes. One example: the next time you visit the site, it may remember you and adapt the site based on your prior visit or store your login preference (like of you signed in with Google, it may store a token to keep you from having to log in again). You can test this by clearing your cookies and seeing how many sites ask you to sign in or treat you as if you never visited before.",
"You know those cards that coffee shops give you, where you get ten holes punched in the card and then you get a free coffee or something? This is a way for the coffee shop to keep track of how many coffees you've bought, except that it's *you* that stores the information *for* them. A cookie is like that, except that it's a lot more information than how many coffees you bought. It likely tracks stuff like who you are and if you've logged in recently, and how long you've been logged in. Combined with the information they keep on file about you, there's quite a bit of personal information in there. It's a chunk of data buried in the HTTP headers that tells the browser \"hang onto this data and give it back to me later\". Normally, it's a convenience for you. It saves you the trouble of logging in to the same web page over and over again once you've logged in. It can be a privacy issue though, since there's a way for web sites to share cookie information with each other. Mention that you're interested in finding a new carburetor for your Fiat on Reddit¹, and the next thing you know, you're seeing carburetor ads on Facebook. It's enough of a problem that the EU has passed a law that requires web sites to warn you if they use cookies. This is why you see that cookie warning everywhere you go nowadays. ---- ¹ Just an experiment to see if Reddit shares cookies. If I start getting ads for Fiat carburetors, I'll know. ---- Edit: three days gone, and no ads for Fiat carburetors. Now I'll try actually searching for them and we'll see what happens. ---- Edit: ten days gone, and no ads for Fiat carburetors yet. On the other hand, I've seen ads on Reddit for things I mentioned elsewhere. But that means that those other sites are sharing data with advertisers that use Reddit; not with Reddit directly.",
"As others have mentioned, cookies store little bits of information about you in little files. While they can be misused by malicious websites, they primarily serve to improve your experience without the need to log in to an account or save this data on their servers. Some common uses of cookies include: * Shopping carts * Recently viewed items * Targeted Ads * Discounts * The \"Remember Me\" option on login * Recommended videos on YouTube (assuming you aren't already logged into an account) * Game Saves for online web games that don't require you to log in * Switching on/off dark mode"
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hytfxr | How does a bluetooth connection work? | Things like airdrop, or playing music through bluetooth... What's actually happening? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Radio waves are used to send data between the two devices, just like you would use for WiFi. Bluetooth describes a specific way of sending data, that uses a certain set of frequencies and way of encoding information. Bluetooth is designed to not use very much power and to work over short distances. I'm happy to give a more detailed explanation of how this works if you want :)."
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hyv4u6 | as far as we have come with technology and internet, why is online voting not a thing? Like for presidential elections and stuff. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a far lower tolerance for risk. If an online bank suffers from a massive security flaw that gets exploited, worst case scenario is a lot of money being lost. Devastating, but relatively easy to correct. If an online voting system were compromised, the effects of a illegitimately won race could have severe implications for the country. The fact there isn't a single database of all citizens, where they live, etc other than state-created voter registrations, also makes such a concept a bit more difficult."
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hyv57t | How do record players start at the right spot? | For example, I put a record into my player, I turn it on, it spins for a few seconds then the arm drops and it starts playing. How does it ensure that it always drops in the right spot on the track, and not too early or late? The rexord spins and the needle drops, how does the machine know where the start is? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a “lead-in” groove. The RPM setting of the turntable normally dictates where the arm positions itself before dropping the needle. When you drop the needle onto the vinyl, most likely it will not be in the grove. Mechanical forces will cause the needle to quickly spiral outward, immediately catching the groove within a single rotation of the vinyl record. From then on, “you’re in the groove...” I haven’t used a turntable in 30-40 years, so newer technology might have made this much more complicated, but that’s how it used to work.",
"Records are a standard size, and the vast majority start at the outer edge. So the record arm can just go a fixed distance and drop and that’ll be the outer edge of the record. My record player has a little switch that lets you switch between 12” and 7”, so depending on which one it’s set to, it’ll just pick one of two distances to move the arm."
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hyvx9e | what causes the weird buzzing noises when you touch a 3.5mm jack plugged into a speaker? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body is acting like a radio antenna, and conducting that signal into the input of the amplifier. The most common local source of noise is going to be the magnetic fields generated by the power grid. So the noise is usually 50hz or 60hz depending on what country you live in.",
"Your body becomes an antenna. Sometimes you can actually hear a radio station (very quietly) this way!",
"It's the sound of a million audio engineers crying out in pain at whoever thought it was good to make a connector with the signal on the tip and ground on the sleeve. Other people explained why, I just wanted to point out that it's mainly the fault of poor design, and relatively newer connector formats like XLR avoid this issue. Ground connects first is now the rule.",
"Seeing as this thread is filled with alot of smart people I have another question. Back in the late 90s I had an external active speaker connected to the family PC. If you cranked that bad boy up I swear I could hear what sounded like an eastern-european radio-show of some sorts. This was 20 years ago so I can't recall much detail about the pc being on or off or anything, but both me and a friend of mine agree that is what we heard. Can speakers pick up radio-waves or something? Is there a phenomena that can explain what we heard?",
"I'm not really an expert on this so I might get something wrong but I haven't seen a thorough answer yet so I'll give it a try. There are a few things that could be happening and one that probably is. The first thing to notice is that this isn't something special about your body. It will happen if you touch the jack to anything conductive (like a metal spoon) (obviously not while you're holding it). If you touch it to something bigger (like the spoon resting on a metal plate) the sound should be louder. If the noise coming out of your speakers sounds like a low hum, then it's probably coming from the AC power in your walls. Mains power is AC, meaning that it alternates between high and low at 50 or 60 Hertz (aka times per second). This means that it produces an electromagnetic field with the same frequency. Anything in your house that can act like an antenna (or, more accurately, the secondary winding of a transformer) can pick up this electromagnetic field and turn it back into an electric current. That 60Hz oscillation in current causes your speaker's membrane to move in and out at 60Hz which in turn causes a 60Hz audio sound. Under perfect conditions, a 60Hz sine wave would be a very smooth tone toward the low end of human hearing. But, your body is not a perfect antenna so the signal is a little noisy. Most of what you are hearing as the \"buzz\" are the overtones or harmonics (or just plain noise) in this signal, which sounds louder because it is higher pitched. You could test this theory by taking a battery powered speaker outside, away from mains power, and trying again. --- This is probably what's happening, but it's not the only way you can interact with a circuit. Your skin also has a capacitance (around 100-200pF) which means that it can act like a very tiny battery, charging and discharging many times a second. This can cause your amp to oscillate, creating a very faint nose. Your skin also has a potential which is probably slightly different from the ground level in your speaker. If you touch the tip of the jack and hear a click instead of a buzz, this is what's happening. Sound is caused by a *change* in pressure, and speakers convert *changes* in current into that changing pressure. Many rapid changes make many rapid clicks which make a tone, but a single change (like the change between the floating wire and your body) just makes one click.",
"I feel like the tip answer doesn't answer the question. Now if someone can ELI5 it that'd be great. It's because improper grounding. Yes it could be because our body is indirectly becoming an antenna but why you hear it is because that energy, most likely the 50 or 60Hz of your power line can't be dissipated properly."
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hyygzk | Why do game developers often leave unused assets on games that they ship out to consumers? | Wouldn’t it make more sense to remove anything that was unused to make room for something else, especially when it comes to old cartridge based games that had to use as much space as they could? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From my experience programming, it is a metric ton of work to go through a program and make sure an asset isnt used, and the payoff isnt terribly large if you find it isnt used."
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hyz5ye | How does 8-bit music work and how is made? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"8 bit music was made with a miniature version of a synthesizer which is a type of musical instrument that produces sound through oscillators. Synths were adapted to the different videogame consoles at the time by making them into small scale sound chips. This chip was in charge of producing different types of sounds and depending on the type of chip would have a certain limit of voices or sounds that could be produced simultaneously (this is why in games like TMNT on the NES you have voice stealing sometimes, this also happens on SMB3). Considering the technology when 8 bit consoles were released the amount of sounds and type of sounds that could be produced were limited (some of this technology is still current and many synthesizers are still released with a certain number of voices, these are monophonic, paraphonic and polyphonic) this is also IMO one of the reasons why Japanese videogame composers are incredibly talented, they created incredible attention grabbing melodies with limited resources. Also some of these tracks were inspired by innovative music at the time (read about Latin Jazz influences on the original Super Mario Bros. theme). There has been a resurgence of 8 bit type of music with a genre called chiptune. If you are interested in knowing more or making some music of your own check out r/synthesizers, the community there can point you towards exactly and specifically which type of chip and synths inspired the different sound machines in old videogame consoles. Hope this is helpful, not an expert but a synth enthusiast.",
"Back in the early days of gaming, 8-bit music was made using a sound chip inside the console. Each of these chips contain channels of which specific tones can be created from. The most iconic source of \"8-bit music\" is arguably the NES, who's chip is known as the APU (Audio Processing Unit). The APU has 5 audio channels. The first two channels create pulse waves, which basically act as the melody for a game. The third channel produces triangle waves, which typically were used for baselines. The fourth channel creates noise, or sometimes called static, which was used for percussion. Since space on cartridges at this point was a luxury, audio was made on the fly using this sound chip. The game sends this chip instructions which produces the waves at their correct pitch. The last channel on the NES was a sample channel, which took audio files from the game and played them out. Such files were extremely small in length order to save space. Interesting enough, the Japanese Famicom System actually has the ability to accept additional audio from games themselves, if they had extra hardware. One of the best exams of this is Konami's VRC6, which gives the Famicom an additional two square wave channels and one sawtooth wave channel. This allows for an incredible expansion of the audio quality of the game, and if you don't believe me, listen to the NES Castlevania 3 soundtrack, then listen to the soundtrack for Akumajō Densetsu. The difference is astounding. TLDR: Chips inside the consoles contain channels, and games send these chips instructions so that specific types of sound waves are played over each channel to mix and form a soundtrack."
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hyz7eh | How does an air conditioner work? | I tried the google, and it made me more confused. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a 'refrigeration cycle'. You cycle a 'refrigerant' through a tube. This is what used to be called 'freon' before the most common type of refrigerant was banned because it was bad for the ozone layer. 1. compress the refrigerant -- it warms up! This step takes up most of the power required to run the AC 2. vent excess heat out the *back* side of the AC -- condensing the refrigerant. 3. pass refrigerant through expansion valve. *Greatly* cools it! 4. pass the air you want to cool past the newly cold refrigerant. The refrigerant absorbs the heat out of the air and the refrigerant evaporates back to a gas. 5. Return to step 1! This cycle is sometimes called a \"heat pump\". It removes heat from one side (the evaporator) and vents it out the other (the condensor). For a home air conditioner the condenser is what sits outside the house. On a refrigerator, the condenser is the hot coils on the back.",
"[Technology Connections]( URL_0 ) has a great video explaining it. He goes on a bit but should give you a good idea of how they work.",
"It works more a less the same as a fridge does. The key point is that when the coolant is compressed it gets warmer and can shed energy into the environment outside, and when after that the pressure is dropped and the coolant is allowed to vaporize at low pressure and temperature it takes up and removes energy from the inside. Then the coolant is compressed, raising its temperature, and the cycle is repeated."
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hz2gb9 | Why is phone hold music such terrible audio quality, even though phone conversations are great? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Music has a wide range of sounds from very low bass and drums to high sounds like violins and flutes, but talking tends to be in a very narrow range of medium sound, not particularly low or high. There are so many phone calls happening at once and a limited space to fit all those signals. So to fit them all, the sound of the phone call is taken from just that middle range where talking happens. With this smaller range of sound to send to the phones the more phone calls can be sent at once. But cutting the high and low parts out of the music makes it sound weird."
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hzb2lz | why do most companies use standardized connections but companies like Apple have their own? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fzhu25x"
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"text": [
"If you have a standardized connection, it is easy to replace your device with some other brand that uses the same connector. If you have your own connector, it becomes more difficult (or expensive) to switch to other brands. It is a way to help cement customer loyalty."
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hzbk7e | How is it safer to insert you bank card instead of swiping when buying something and where does that leave NFC thing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"When you swipe your card you're using its magnetic strip. The magnetic strip contains all of your cards info in plain text. Anyone with a reader can easily get your name, card number, and expiration date from that strip in the exact format that they need to make a copy of the card. To make the system even less secure, card duplicators are cheap and easy to get - the original intention of the magnetic strip system was to make it really easy for merchants to make their own cards but that turned out to be a gigantic security hole. When you insert the card you're not using the magnetic strip. Instead you're using a chip that's been embedded in the card. That chip is part of a 2 factor identification system. When the card is inserted into the reader the credit card company sends a signal to the card with a random number. The chip applies a complicated math formula to that number to generate a new number, which it sends back. The credit card company knows the formula associated with your card's chip, so it knows what number to expect back. If it doesn't get that number it won't process the transaction. It is technically possible to duplicate the chip in your card, but the equipment needed to do so isn't publicly available. Even if you could get the proper equipment its doubtful that it would be cost effective to do. This makes the chip much more secure than the magnetic strip. NFC credit cards are essentially a programmable version of a credit card chip that you have in your phone. Except that instead of having an external connector that you stick into a machine, your phone has a very short range radio that it can use to talk to credit card machines if you hold your phone next to them.",
"The strip is a simple data storage - you can ask it \"what do you have\" and it will tell you. If someone manages to catch the data in transmission, they can do anything with it. The chip more secretive, it will never tell you its secrets. Instead, you can only ask it a question, and depending on the question it will give you an answer. The question changes every time you use the card, so the answer is completely useless afterwards and nobody can exploit it."
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