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itrh02 | How can a group of hobbyists or whatever make a deepfake that sounds exactly like Bill Gates, while digital assistants made by the world's biggest tech companies still sound like robots? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. Creating a small individual clip of bill gates talking realistically is reletively easy compared to the millions of phrases a voice assistant might say at any moment 2. People actually prefer the robotics voice compared to the human due to the uncanny valley effect you get when an artificial object becomes \"too human\". It creeps people out more if it sounds like there's another person talking when it's the assistant. 3. Cost, it'd be way more expensive to invest in having a realistic voice when people prefer the more robotic voice which is easier to synthesize."
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itswbo | What does 1920*1080 resolution means? I know this is 1080p HD resolution. But what does these numbers represent exactly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your screen, as well as any computer image, is a grid of tiny dots called pixels, each of which can be a different color. The resolution is simply the number of pixels. 1920\\*1080 means the screen or image is 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall."
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itu7j9 | How does Disney+ prevent screen shots?I'm having a hard time imaging that a website can do that.Like cant you just snip it or us another program? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. In Android and iOS apps, the ability to take system-level screenshots can be disabled in certain pages of the apps as a security measure. 2. In the web browser, the browser is just drawing a blank area and telling the graphics card what to put there *after* it renders the stream. This bypasses the Operating System, so OS-level screenshots don't work.",
"They use something called Google Widevine, and basically the way that works is the encrypted video stream is passed directly to the hardware, the OS draws the window as having a black box where the video player should be, and the processor at the hardware level decrypts and draws the media over that black box. So to the OS, because it doesn’t have access to that portion of the hardware rendering the video, all it sees is the black box it was told to draw. Actually, iOS and Android apps work in exactly the same way—this is why you can’t get around it with just a jailbreak or root tweak to bypass the screenshot security restriction. Because this is a feature the hardware has to support, that’s why on older devices and TVs you get an error saying Netflix or other streaming services aren’t supported—they don’t have a chip certified for secure processing of the video stream. I believe in order to record these streams at the moment a hardware mod is needed since the data is simply never passed to the OS, but I have been out of that scene for a while.",
"It's part of encrypted video steam support. The OS has features that disable it. You can still take pictures of your screen using a camera. It's more or less the same reason when you plug a suspicious cheap flat screen TV (like you may find in hotels) your video steam goes black on all your screens. It detects an uncertified video output. The goal is to make ripping content not as trivial. (It's really weak protection in practice, but it makes investors happy)"
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itwtu3 | How does TMS ( transcranial magnetic stimulation) work? | I have been reading about TMS for a while but I just can't understand how the whole thing works so I guess this is the place to ask. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I’ll preface this statement by stating that the first few lines of Wikipedia probably contain more accurate information than this post will but here you go anyway... I have rather pronounced bipolar 2, anxiety and severe depression that I take several medications for. The most effective is Seroquel although it has the most side effects ie. massive weight gain, drowsiness, mental fogginess, etc. My girlfriend showed me an article on TMS a few days ago and I discussed it with my mental health specialist yesterday. According to her the psych meds I take stimulate neurons in the brain that are not naturally firing due to my diagnosis. TMS uses magnetic waves in order to stimulate these same neurons without chemicals and their accompanying side effects. This is done much the same way as an MRI is performed. She also told me not to expect insurance to pay for the treatment so theres that. I’d love to get off of some or all my medication so to all the wonderful people of reddit who are all smarter than I, please weigh in. Thanks all!"
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itx3sk | Why does an aux cable connected to a speaker/amp buzz when a finger touches it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The buzz is the sound of the radio waves created by the electricity all around you. When you touch the cable, you become a big antenna and gather some of those radio waves and pass them into the input."
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itzgfv | What are the differences between the new AMD processors and the more established Intel processors, and does one truly offer a real benefit over the other? | I've been hearing about the new AMD Ryzen processors for a little while, however I'm not tech-savvy enough to understand whether these offer a true benefit over the more established Intel processors. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"AMD makes their own chips from scratch which are compatible with Intel's x86 chips. (hell, AMD invented the 64 bit x86 instruction set). They don't fit into motherboards for Intel chips, but that's expected and okay. They still run Windows, Chrome, and Steam video games so to most users it doesn't really matter what they have inside their computer case. For a few years before the Ryzen launch (in 2017) Intel was the undisputed king of performance with AMD being more of a low cost, low performance alternative. Then along came Ryzen and it changed the market. The CPUs weren't quite as good as Intel chips when measured by \"calculations done on 1 core at a certain speed\", which is a big deal especially for video games, and Intel still tended to have more GHz on their best chips. However in every other way that mattered AMD was kicking Intel's butt. Work done for power consumed, number of CPU cores, price for performance, number of PCI-E lanes, AMD had a significant and rather unexpected advantage. If you can make use of a lot of cores Ryzen was a no-brainer for your next PC. Fast forward 2 years and AMD is still making improvements. Even in the server market AMD has more cores for cheaper. With AMD you can get a CPU with 64 cores for around ~7,000 USD. Intel's 28 core CPU costs over 10,000 USD and some benchmarks has 1 AMD chip beating 2 Intel chips. 5 years ago AMD wasn't an option for someone who wanted a kick-ass computer. Today they are a very serious competitor to Intel.",
"There are a lot of differences between the processors, most of them very subtle at first glance. This means that you have to look at benchmarks for the specific workload that you want to use them for to be able to compare them properly. One of the highly featured difference is the manufacturing technique. Intel have been struggling with developing manufacturing procedures with under 10nm precision while AMD have outsourced the manufacturing to TSMC who are manufacturing the chips with 7nm precision. This does give AMD processors a power and heating advantage. However there are other design features that might negate this advantage. Perhaps the biggest benefit of buying AMD processors is that they are pushing Intel on performance and price giving us consumers a better deal. If Intel gets a monopoly there is nothing stopping them from cutting down their design department and increase their profit margin as we would still be forced to buy their processors."
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itziwt | How does YouTube algorithm works?? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It looks at what you like and watch, then shows you more videos and channels that you like and watch. Stuff you're subscribed or likely to subscribe to gets promoted first. They can scan the videos for stuff like Cats, Dogs, Funny, Serious, Runtime, \"For Adults/Kids\", or whatever else you can think of to compare one video vs the other vs your watch history. On top of that, folks can pay money to get their videos at the top of the algorithm. Both to youtube directly and to other companies that spoof views to fiddle with a particular video's algorithm directly. [Here's a video]( URL_0 ) that can help you give some insight on how to game the system. As for something more specific, that's all a very closely held trade secret that YouTube and almost every other internet company will never disclose, because it's the core of their business."
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itzyvp | What does Snowflake (the company) do and why is it so popular? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are a cloud-based data warehouse. Basically, enterprise generate a ton of data, and storing that data is expensive. Snowflake offers to store it all on their servers for a monthly fee and in exchange handle all of the maintenance, backups, etc. They also provide a suite of data analytics so that customers can get insights from the data. Again, having all of the data in one place and having good analytical tools is expensive/difficult, so Snowflake is able to offer that to customers for a fee."
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iu3in7 | What are Internet cookies? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cookies are basically a way for websites to track and store data on you. So they can track things like what articles you read, what adds you click, what things you search. Websites will say that this benefits the users because it means they can give you adds more targeted to you. But at the same time they’ll also turn around and sell that information onto other companies. For the majority of people cookies really aren’t the end of the world, but anytime you see those pop ups there’s usually a button/link like “manage my cookies” where you can go and turn them all off."
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iu6n9x | I have a laptop with two drives and I don’t know how that works. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Put windowsand maybe 1 or 2 daily games on ssd, put the rest on hdd. Steam makes it trivial to move installations back and forth when your main games change."
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3
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iu6qx3 | where does electricity come from? How’s it made? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Grid-level generation comes from generators, which are just big motors that are being forced to turn instead of powering something. There is a magnet turning in a coil of wire. In this action, the magnets basically drag elections through the coil of wire. This flow of electrons is what we call electricity. Edit: wind, water, or steam from geothermal sources or burning fossil fuels are what turn the magnets. As for batteries, they're basically magic.",
"Electricity is the movement of electrons between atoms. This makes electricity a type of kinetic energy (along with heat, which is the movement of atoms instead of just the movement of electrons). As energy cannot be created or destroyed, electricity isn’t really made; it is harnessed or transformed. This is usually done by putting two materials near each other with a large difference in electrons and a conductive surface between them. The electrical difference will induce a current as the electrons flow from one place to the other, balancing out the number of electrons in both places. It’s kind of like if we pour water in one end of a bathtub, it will flow to evenly cover the entire bottom of the tub instead of piling up at one end."
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iu7gus | Why is it that when you have a poor connection while streaming a video, the video quality may go down, but the audio quality never does? | If you're watching YouTube on your phone on data, or just bad WiFi, it might turn the video quality down to 240p or 144p, but the audio quality is always the same, no matter the video quality setting or your connection, it either loads or doesn't load. Why? Is it not as easy to compress audio as it as video? Is it just not worth it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Audio small, video big. When the pipe get small, the audio still fits in, but the video does has to squeeze."
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iu7wx3 | The benefits of OOP over procedure based | ELI5: In object oriented programming, why would I create and instantiate classes to perform a task, when I can write a function and just call it to do the same thing. What is the advantage to OOP over procedural programming? I've researched the hell out of this, and read a few books on it, but as soon as I sit down to write some code it's like my mind blanks on how / why to do a class and my inner voice just says "go with a function instead..." | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The best example from me for OOP is \"Do I care what the object actually is?\". Yes, you can say \"I have a function which connects to a database and closes it for every kind of database I know: mysql_connect() and mysql_close(), pgsql_connect() and pgsql_close() etc.\" and since in my code I know which database I have I call the right one.\". And then one day you (or a customer, or somebody else who uses your code) goes from \"I want to change from mysql to pgsql\" and you have to go through you code to replace mysql_ with pgsql_ and then it works for them. Little bit annoying to replace everything, but fine. Now it you had taken an OOP approach, you would have said at the beginning \"I need to do the following for every database class I know: connect() and close(). And then you write a database class which says \"I have the connect() and close() functions\". And then for every database you support you inherit that database class and implement the connect() and close() functions which call the mysql_connect()/pgsql_connect() and mysql_close()/pgsql_close(). Now when you initialize your generic database object, you make it of the right mysql-type because you use the mysql database. And when your customer/college/user uses it, they make it of the right pgsql-type because they use that. Does it change anything in your code? No, because you only deal with the generic database class, not with the specific database class. So, functional programming: You need to care in detail with what you're working with, OOP programming: You don't care what the implementation details are of the object itself, outside it you just work with the abstraction and functions provided.",
"The main advantage of OOP is the ability to track an infinite number of things. I can have 30,000 transactions going on simaltainiously, but it's exactly the same amount of work to program as 1 transaction."
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iu81tt | Why do recorded voices never sound exactly like actual people talking? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the microphone they are recorded with and the device playing them back. Also, it depends on the environment they recorded in and the environment you are listening in. In a nutshell, all these factors create frequency discrepancies that our ears can easily pick up on. Now if you mean more specifically why does your own recorded voice sound so different from hearing yourself talk, it's because the sound is resonating differently inside your own body than it does when it enters the atmosphere."
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iu8vin | why does turning off and on your technology usually resolve issues that your tech is having? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most tech is “state based”, meaning if there’s an error (say, can’t open a file on your computer), it’ll remain in that error until it’s reset to a fresh state. If you have a tub you’re trying to fill up with water and when you turn the tap on, it starts to leak, you close the tab, fix the hole, then turn it back on (incredibly simplistic metaphor because it’s how I understand it).",
"Most tech basically has 2 copies of it's operating system. It has a \"pristine\" copy that lives in it's hard drive, and doesn't really get messed with. Each time you turn it on it loads a copy of this into RAM (memory), and that copy is highly volatile as it changes with each action you take. This changes eventually cause instability, and it breaks. Then you reboot, and it reloads a pristine copy for you to start over with. To really make this \"like I'm 5\", think of it like a child's blocks. The hard drive is a toy box that has the blocks stored all perfect and neat. Each time you turn it on it, you move the blocks onto a table where the child gets to play with them. Each action the child takes leaves the blocks more and more scattered about. When you reboot, you put them all back in the box nice and tidy, and start fresh."
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iu8vl6 | Why can't cameras record in 4k at high frame rates | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine recording 1 pixel at 60fps, your pixel is made of 3 colors, each with 1 byte of info, so you have to have 3x60 or 180 bytes per second. If you double that to 120fps, your storage requirements also double, and if you add more pixels, the storage requirements also multiply by the number of pixels. So wanting 2x the pixel density as 1080p, at 2x the frame rate means that you need 4x the storage. They can do it, but it's super memory intensive."
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iu9qgm | how diodes work in electronics | I have a really basic understanding that diodes act like check valves in an electronic system, but how do they actually work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's all about charge carriers. A diode is a P-N junction: one side is in excess of holes or +'ve carriers (P) and the other side in excess of electrons or -'ve carriers (N). Applying a negative charge on the P side and positive charge on the N side pulls (opposite charges attract) their respective carries away from the junction so no conduction can occur. Applying a positive charge on the P side and a negative charge on the N side pushes (because similar charge repell) their respective carriers across the junction so you have conduction. So in the end you can describe conduction through a diode as either a flow of holes in one direction or a flow of elections in the other. Late Edit.",
"So you have two materials, both of them semiconductors. One of them is \"doped\" with a material that makes it have a higher affinity for negative charges, and the other is doped such that it has a higher affinity for positive charges. To make a diode, you connect both of these together. When you do that, the boundary becomes neutral Then, when you put an electric potential through the diode, the behavior is determined by which side the current comes from. If current flows into the negative side, then it allows the negative side to flow into this neutral region, decreasing its size, and allows current out the other side. If however, your current flows into the positive side, it blocks the current by pulling the different charges away from the neutral region, increasing its size, and blocking the current from flowing."
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iuairz | Why do old music recordings sound good but old speaking recordings sound bad | I'm listening to a piece of classical music recorded in 1968, and the quality is really very good. Its comparable to modern recordings, at least from my phone speaker. But a recording with a human voice in it from 1968 would not be comparable to today's recordings at all. why? Edit: it was a Brahms quintet, for more context. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I’m no expert, but I’m assuming that there is a lot more money to be made with popular music than there was with spoken word, so it’s presumably a difference in equipment affordability. It’s like the difference between a lowly podcaster in his basement and genuine recording studio.",
"Just the time and money that went into the recording. The vocals in music from the same time frame sound as good as today's. Really most of it is the same equipment even. Today's industry standard voice mic is the Neumann U87 which was first made in 1967. The much more expensive and somewhat better U67 was made in 1960. The same goes for the Preamps and a lot of the other gear. So as to why many voice recordings from that era sound poor is because is they were done cheaply and usually not in a studio.",
"I think it depends from recording to recording. If you are comparing studio recorded music to publically recorded speeches - with the type of microphone, ambience, noise etc. it's going to be different. I bet if you compare it to any properly recorded speeches, you'll find them to be of good quality as well. For [example]( URL_0 )."
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iuck5h | Why an Android ROM can't be installed as easily as can be instaledl a Linux or Windows on PC? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically it's because phone manufacturers don't want you to, so they lock down the ability to. They want you to use their build of the OS with their apps and such. They get paid to pre-load apps. And the phone carriers like it that the OS is locked down so people can't play around with stuff as much. Whereas on a PC you can install whatever OS you want on it (within limitations of hardware type). The manufacturer doesn't care what you do with the hardware once it leaves their factory. It's a 1 time purchase not something that has a monthly service."
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iudw8i | How did people set their clocks to tell the correct time prior to cell phones/ computers that automatically get the time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There were no accurate universal time until quite recently and everybody had to figure out how they set their clocks. Many people considered clock towers or the timing of church bells ringing to tell the \"real time\" and set their clocks based on that time. Of course, this wasn't very accurate but it didn't have to be. There was no reason to synchronize time accurately across long distances and it didn't really make a difference if your friend's clock was set 5 minutes ahead of yours. This served adequately until the introduction of rail travel in Britain, which made it possible to travel fast enough over long distances to require continuous re-setting of timepieces as a train progressed in its daily run through several towns. When the telegraph was invented in the mid 1800s, it now became possible to synchronize clocks across large distances by broadcasting the time over the telegraph. Greenwich Mean Time was developed and all clocks in Britain were set to this time baded on telegraph time broadcasts regardless of local solar noon. Standard time was originally proposed by Scottish-Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming at a meeting of the Canadian Institute in Toronto on 8 February 1879. He suggested that 24 standard time zones could be used locally, but they were subordinate to his single world time, which he called Cosmic Time. This eventually became UTC time and time zones. Later in the 1900s, we developed radio broadcast clock transmissions and finally in the 1980s, we developed NTP (network time protocol) which allowed computers to synchronize their times over the internet.",
"How far back are we talking? There was time told on TV, on other clocks, on the radio, there was a phone service where you can call and hear exact time. Before all of that and if your clock is the only one around, look at the shadows on sunny day - when they're shortest it's the astronomical noon, getting you the hour right, then correct for longitude if you know where you are to get the minutes almost right. You'll be by up to 5 minutes off still, but do you really care about that, apparently stranded away from all the other people?",
"One way was to call the local time and temperature phone number. In most jurisdictions it was 555-1212. I don't know if that works everywhere though, as I just dialed it and got a different business.",
"In the UK the BBC news would have the time displayed in the mornings, and there was a \"speaking clock\" you could phone and it would give you the precise time. Prior to that I know that in London there were people who would \"sell the time\", they would go up to greenwich to get the exact time then go round London setting the clocks in businesses, who would pay them for it. Elsewhere in the country I believe more guess work was involved, though sunrise has a fairly consistent timing once you know how it changes each day so the guess would've been fairly accurate",
"In Italy, the state sponsored radio station would announce the exact time a few times a day before broadcasting the news, there was also a phone number you could call. There were also clocks in front of railways stations, and often outside of banks, post offices and jewelers.",
"From experience, way out here in Africa, we used to listen to the BBC World Service on shortwave radio. They would have a countdown of the last five seconds to the top of the hour. It was a pointless but immensely satisfying fact for me to get the second hand on my watch to hit exactly 12 when the final, longer tone played. Combine that with knowing we were GMT+2 in our summer and you have the time.",
"Many countries actually have a phone number to call to get the correct time . Earlier that banks and town squares had a clock available that world chime bells on the hour. Then there was the train station with a clock. The railroad was actually responsible for the adoption of standardized time in the western world and the adoption of time zones in the US. Before the railroad each town just had their own local time estimated by the sun"
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iue46w | What are CDNs (content delivery networks) and how do these companies (Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare) make money ?? | - please really explain it like i am a five year-old. I don’t even understand the basics of it and I’m supposed to do research about the industry (for my job)... help me out ? :)) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You run a candy company and sell directly from your factory - your candy is super delicious and customers love it, but for your customers who live over an hour away from your factory the process to drive to your factory, buy the candy, and drive home is unbearably long. Because of this you make a deal with a chain of stores nationwide to sell your candy. They send trucks to you daily to pick up from you then send it to all their stores, and you pay them to do this. Now your customers can buy your candy really quickly, rather than a 2+ hour round trip. In the above analogy, your candy = your website, your factory = your main server, the nationwide chain of stores = the CDN.",
"You own a website, and you host it in a particular datacenter somewhere on the globe. You have users who are geographically widespread. The ones who are physically closest to your datacenter get a noticeably better experience on your website than the ones that aren't. You want to improve on this. A CDN company offers you geographically distributed servers where your content can be made available. You pay them for this service, and update your hostnames so they point at the CDN company's servers instead of your own directly. The CDN servers get the data from your servers on your users' behalf, but they keep it available locally for a good while in case more of your users ask for the exact same thing. That way, much of an individual users' traffic only goes to a server that's local to them. This makes responsiveness and data throughput better and users' experience improves."
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iuej9g | Proxy Servers | Why some websites don’t work well with Proxy Servers ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why some websites don’t work well with Proxy Servers ? You will need to be more specific about what you mean and possibly consult r/techsupport. The statement \"Some websites don't work well with proxy servers\" by itself does not make a lot of sense, something is missing here."
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iueo4m | How do computers know to power back on when you restart them? | How does it know to execute that command after it has powered down? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"There is a small piece of software running that doesn't actually turn off. Motherboards have a tiny chip called the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) which has instructions on how to turn the rest of the computer on and when you start the computer all the button does is tell the BIOS chip to start everything up. When you restart the computer, the BIOS chip is given an instruction to turn the computer on as soon as it detects that the computer is turned off and then the computer shuts down normally which triggers the BIOS to start it back up again.",
"A computer has many separate systems and you don't shut down all of them. If you press restart the main system sends a message to the power controller system ([ACPI]( URL_0 )) on the motherboard to immediately reapply power after it stops running.",
"The motherboard doesn't power down all the way. A small part of it, running on what's called 'standby power', remains 'awake' while the rest of the system powers down, and then initiates the reboot. Standby power keeps your network adapter going, so that you don't have to reconnect to the network from scratch after every shutdown, and it also runs the system clock. (Not the CPU timing clock, but the \"what time of day is it\" clock.) Probably other stuff too, but those are the only ones I'm sure about.",
"The other posters are correct to say that modern computers don't usually completely power down, so part of the system is still running and has the ability to power-up the rest. This \"soft power\" feature is true for most modern electronic devices and appliances. Anything that can be turned on with a remote was never completely dead. BUT, older computer didn't work this way; they had actual power switches that cut all power from the processor. And even new computers *can* be powered completely off. So, how does a computer start up when it really was completely dead? Well, here's a simple example of how it might be done: At the very heart of a computer, at it's most basic hardware level the computer has a fixed number of states it can be in and it is continually looping through these states depending on it's instructions and inputs. The danger of powering on for the first time is that this state is completely random. Every register or counter that normally keeps track of what the computer is supposed to be doing is now full of garbage. The only way to prevent a crash in this situation is to make sure every single possible state is accounted for and is part of the loop, and that part of that loop checks to see if it has just been turned on. Then it will start the boot-up process that checks on the hardware, sets all of the registers, loads the operating system, etc. An example that might help you understand this type of \"state machine\" is a traffic light. If you watch a traffic light you can see that it goes through a series of different states: At one point the East-West light are green and the North-South lights are red. Then the East-West lights turn yellow, then red, and the North-South lights turn green. Each of these configurations is a state and you could document them all on a sheet of paper if you watched the light for a while. The loop might be the same every time, or it might chang based on inputs. maybe there is a left-turn lane and a light dedicated to it so that when a car is in the left-turn lane the left-turn light turns green at the appropriate time instead of the North-South lights. You could document how the traffic light works in a flow chart. A computer is much more complex, but works essentially the same way. Instead of turning lights on and off it might add two numbers, store a value in memory, or display something on the screen."
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iuf5td | How does text to speech work? Do they get the people voicing the "speech part" to say a lot of words or is it a different way all together? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends of how advanced the text to speech is. In the early days of text to speech they only recorded sounds like \"Ch\" and \"ee\" combining them to make the words, The result was sloppy. These days they voice whole words by getting the voice actors to read whole sentences, like from a book and put that into an AI. The voice actor for Alexa spent weeks to months reading out loud and recording it. The voice actors try to read with little to no emotion yet still fluid speech so when the AI does need to chop up a word it can without it sounding strange."
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iuj51w | What is my computer actually doing while I’m waiting for a game to load? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Rendering the level you’re about the enter, as well as loading all the information tied to that level in one big loading screen instead of maybe having a laggy experience with a bunch of small loads everytime you interact with soemthing. Conceptually it’s similar to letting a YouTube video buffer before you start playing it. Yea you’ve gotta wait a little bit But it’ll make the overall experience smoother.",
"It’s copying the stuff form your drive to the ram, because ram is super fast and the cpu can only execute code directly form ram, but the storage drive is a lot slower than ram so it takes quite a while for the game to load",
"It's loading all the resources and assets it needs into memory. Sort of like if you're getting ready to make a presentation and you need one person to connect the cables between the computer and the speakers and the computer and the projector, and you need another person to actually pull up the PowerPoint on the computer, and a third person to distribute all the relevant talking points to the people attending the presentation."
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iujj3l | Why do you need WIFI to install video games on your computer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You need internet, not specifically WiFi. Games these days aren't small enough to fit on a disc anymore so additional files are downloaded.",
"> You're just installing the games files and assets into your computer. Yeah from where? Does it get whipped out of a magician's hat? You download stuff from the game company's servers (or Steam's) via the internet. Wi-Fi is a cable to short range radio adapter for an internet connection so you don't need to run a cable to your PC from the router which is plugged into your main internet cable.",
"Depends on the game. It may be requiring a check for patches, more likely for physical media it has some sort of DRM where it needs to check a product code against a license server."
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iujt2c | - Gaming PC Process | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While air is always air, what ends up as a frame goes through countless other forms which have little in common. In a game, the cpu is generally in charge of things happening. Collisions, movements, damage calculations, status effects, quest progression, etc. Your RAM sticks hold the information that is needed for any software you are running, including the operating system and the game. The ram inside your graphics card, called g ram, exclusively holds texture and mesh information. And then of course the graphics card itself does all the rendering. The motherboard is in charge of smooth power distribution and communication between parts. So then the cpu pushes the game from your hard drive to your ram and g ram via the motherboard, and then over and over again the cpu calculates a new state for every single thing that is loaded in the game. e.g. asking each object how far it needs to go considering its speed and what speed it needs to have considering its acceleration, asking each object if it's hitting any other object, etc. The time frame for these updates depends on your frame rate. So the cpu will go “the gpu took 0.01 seconds to render the last frame. This bullet travels at 100 metres per second, so by now it should be 1 metre ahead of its last position” and if the gpu took more time, then the cpu would move the bullet farther to make its speed consistent with real time Then, the cpu will give the gpu information about objects' positions, light sources, etc. through the motherboard, and the gpu will take each object's appearance from its own g ram, use all of this to render a frame and then pass it on to the screen to be displayed."
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iul67h | Green light is a mix of yellow light and blue light, so why do screens and monitors consist of RGB LEDs instead of Red, Yellow, and Blue LEDs, that could also create green light? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g5lam4a",
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"The primary colors of pigment are not the same as the primary colors of light. Pigment is CYM (cyan, yellow, magenta) - you mix colors together to get new colors Light is RGB (red, green, blue) - you take colors away to get new colors. If you mix cyan and yellow paint, you get green. If you mix blue and yellow light you do _not_ get green.",
"Green light isn't a mix of yellow and blue. Green is everything except yellow and blue. Paint or ink use a subtractive color space: when you add yellow ink to blue ink you get something that absorbs both yellow and blue light (so you are only left with green light and thus get green ink). Screens use an additive color space because they emit light. Our eyes have sensors for red, green and blue lights, so every color we can see can be made by mixing different amounts of red green and blue, which is why screens use RGB."
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iulz3y | Why does hanging up a call on a landline phone not end the call on mobile? | Just had a chat with a department store. He hung up his landline, but the call didn't end on my cell phone. This always happens. What's the deal? Edit: The call does eventually drop (after about 26 seconds), but it's different depending on which side initiates the call. See comments below for details. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"If you waited for a few seconds, it should have hung up. On a landline it's really obvious when one party hangs up...the circuit is broken at one end. The phone network knows and you immediately hear that they've hung up on the other end. But mobile phones occasionally drop their signal (switching towers, building got in the way, etc.). Just because there's no signal the mobile network won't immediately assume you hung up and drop the call, it will briefly wait to see if you just temporarily dropped off and are coming back. After a few seconds it'll figure it out and hang up the mobile call. This might be network specific...I'm on AT & T in the US and we get landline calls all the time for teleconference meetings...when the \"meeting\" hangs up there's a lag of 2-3 seconds then the mobile network figures it out and ends the call."
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iupbl6 | How come tech devices / video games / software updates have bugs and flaws although it has been tested by developers and advertised as working smoothly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g5m54tn"
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"text": [
"When you develop a feature, you have to take in consideration if the code you are writing or editing will have impacts on other features. Some times, you have the right scope and you know exactly if it will, some times not. In the case that you impact another feature without knowing, the testing team should raise a bug and a developer should fix it. The main issue is: time. If the client says \"deliver the project\", we have to do it, and sometime, some fixes are missing or some bugs haven't been raised. It really depends on multiple factors, but know that we - Devs - wish to deliver a perfect product at every delivery, but we stay humans and make mistakes. I hope this answer will help you understand better! Sorry for my English, I'm a bit rusty!"
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iuvay5 | If phones and gpus use ddr5 and ddr6 memory, why are laptops and desktops still stuck on ddr4? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phones and GPU's use GDDR5, GDDR5X, or GDDR6. CPUs use DDR3/4 with DDR5 coming soon. GDDR5 runs at a higher voltage than DDR4 (1.2 vs 1.5) because GDDR5 uses the DDR3 memory standard (stock voltage of 1.5). 5X brings it down to 1.35 volts They run at roughly the same stock frequency. DDR4, like SATA, can only do one task (read/write) per cycle(Hz) while GDDR5, X, and 6 can handle read and write tasks in the same cycle. DDR4, with strict timings and smaller channels, can complete tasks faster than GDDR5/6 while GDDR5/6 can complete a lot of larger tasks simultaneously at the cost of speed and efficiency More information: URL_0",
"Phones and GPUs use GDDR5/6 not DDR5 Graphics RAM broke off from system RAM around the DDR3 era because graphics cards have different requirements for their memory than the rest of the system does, primarily the GPUs need for extreme bandwidth going both ways. At a minimum it needs to pull data, do math, push the drawn frame back to RAM, but if you're running AA(antialiasing) it has to pull the frame back in, down sample, then push the correct frame out DDR5 has been announced for PCs but as you need the RAM modules, a physically compatible motherboard, and a CPU with the right memory controller, it'll be a couple years until it's in desktops but that's fine since very few applications are limited by RAM bandwidth (those that are are outsourced to the GPU)"
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iv2lnr | What is a subnet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A subnet at the most basic level is a group of IP addresses. So say your home network has a subnet of 192.168.1.0/24 that means that within your home exists devices with IP addresses in the range of 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.254, calling a subnet a “network” is accurate. All of your devices reside within your network and need some form of routing to communicate with devices in another network or “subnet”. The subnet defines a given segment of the larger network. In a hypothetical scenario where I’m exchanging routes with my neighbors so that our devices can communicate with each other, when I advertise the 192.168.1.0/24 prefix what I’m basically saying is “if you need to communicate with a device in this range come to me”. I’m advertising a specific portion of the larger network between my neighbors and I."
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iv3430 | Where are voicemails being stored? | Yesterday I was thinking about voicemails, and I came to the conclusion that you don't need an internet connection or something else to record or receive a voicemail So I was wondering where is your personal voicemail being stored? It's not on the phone because you can change phones without losing your personal voicemail? And where are incoming voicemails being stored? Is that on a server somewhere? Thnx DarkSmile | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Yes, it is a server. Depending on exactly what voicemail you talk about how has it changes. For the answering machine vanity if someone calls you phone and you can't answer or your phone is off or without reception then it is a server the cellular provider has. If you use Skype, Google Voice it is those companies that have the servers. Large companies can have their own internal systems. A server is hopefully not correct you like to have in on at least to so one can fail and the data still exists and there is not service interruption. For a large system with millions of users, you spread them out over multiple servers."
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iv4w41 | What does an n-bit(like n=64) architecture mean; both as a physical difference on a logic component, and a software-related point of view? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g5p2rfh",
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"text": [
"This \"bit width\" parameter describes how many bits are in the computers primary registers. That influences how large of a number can reference a location in memory, and thus the maximum amount of physical memory. It also determines how many bits a logical operation can operate on. More bits in a single instruction means that it takes fewer instructions to do work on a file or object; presuming your algorithm can exploit all those bits.",
"Depends on context. What you're likely thinking of is x86 vs x86_64 CPUs. In this context, 32- or 64 bits refers to how large an address space the CPU physically supports. In software, the 32 or 64 bit can also refer to addressing space. In both cases, the effect of different address space is primarily seen in memory addressing, as this is where the vast majority of addresses are used. 32 bits permits 2^32 units of memory (or other locations) to be addressed, which in modern technology equates to 4GiB of RAM (minus any other addresses you want to have access to). 64 bits allow over 4 billion times more addresses."
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iv7h0d | Someone sent me a drop box full of torrents for software.What are torrents?How much trouble could get in if I use them ? And how would I even download them ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Torrents are a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. Basically, a few people who have the file 'seed' it to the 'swarm' - the users that want the file. As more people get parts of the file, they in turn seed it to other people who want the file. So long as the entire file exists among all of the members of the swarm (even if no single user hast 100% of the file) then every user will eventually get the entire file. To download torrents, you need a torrent download program - like Deluge or qBittorrent - that allows you to connect to the swarm. You also need a torrent file or magnet link that says _what_ file you are looking to download and what trackers can tell you who is in the swarm for that particular file. Torrenting itself is 100% legal - it is just a file transfer system. **However** - _what_ you torrent may or may not be illegal. Just like any other digital content, you may or may not have the right to disritbute said content to others. Transferring royalty-free or public domain content is fine; transferring copy written content is usually not."
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iv7kw9 | What is the mechanism behind the different sound capability of earphones VS speakers | Hey, So I wonder how come earphones / headphones doesn't make loud sound externally compared to speakers sound, what's the difference electronic mechanism? I know it's sound waves hitting the air but how come one is only heard innerly and the other is heard externally? 2. What cause the different max volume capacity? Is it the size of the electronic output? 3. I understand that sound waves transmit into 0 & 1 and vice versa my question is how the device is able to convert those indefinite sound air waves into the exact sounds waves with only limited 0 & 1 even on an allegedly simple tiny voice recorder? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g5phcjo"
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"The reason you don't think you can hear headphones externally is most likely your only exposure to headphones are closed-back. This style of headphones is super common and what most people use/think of. The backing plate on the exterior of the headphones acts as a bit of sound-deadening and prevents sound leaking in or out. Open-back headphones do not have this backing plate and so they will readily leak sound in and out. Even at medium volume settings, people around you will be able to hear what you are listening to with open back headphones."
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iv8ieg | How are pirated anime streaming services (internationally) still up for so many years despite them being piracy? | Kissanime, a very popular pirated anime streaming site was just only recently shut down, but there are more out there. How come the actual "owners" don't take action more frequently? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g5pneph"
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"In many cases, the owners of the pirated media streaming services are based in countries where the copyright laws are more loose, and thus it becomes harder for foreign companies to shut them down, because from the laws of the country they are in, they haven't done anything wrong, and international lawsuits are very expensive and difficult to arrange."
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iv9q71 | - Why does a game update always require additional data space, even when the update only removes a certain "event" or feature from the game? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"g5pvx39"
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"text": [
"Even when you remove content, what you're doing to do on a file-system level is download new versions of the files that don't have that content and swap them out. The update isn't going in and editing the files in place. This means you need room to download and extract the new version of the files and then move them over the old versions."
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ivd7cz | Why is it that when we watch footage from the 70s a lot of times it looks better than footage of the 90s? | I don't know what it is, but it looks good and sharp despite being pixelated. Example: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) & #x200B; edit: oh shit, this blew up. Thanks for all the answers. I learned a lot! =D | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Video from the 70's was all recorded on analog film. Film actually has an incredible resolution - sometimes better than 4K - so as long as you have the original film you can go back and re-digitize the footage and get high resolution videos. Video from the 90's was often recorded on magnetic tape - like a VCR - which had _terrible_ resolution. There is nothing we can do to go back and get high-res videos from that tape, because the source material isn't good enough.",
"Generally speaking, because a lot of the footage you're seeing from the 1970s that is still popular to watch today was shot on film. And not just any film but *good* film, such as 35mm or 70mm. Good film is expensive (purchase, processing, duplication, storage - everything about it is expensive), they also used good sound and lighting resources because it didn't make sense to use expensive film and cut all the other corners. All of this makes for an experience that has withstood the test of time. In other words, there's some selection bias at play. But going back to the 60s (and maybe even the late 50s), various media used videotape and similar technologies for cheaper applications. For example, soap operas and game shows. If you search for those on youtube you'll see the much lower quality difference. From: URL_0 : > Though most soap operas made the transition from live broadcast to videotaping their shows during the 1960s, it was still common practice to wipe and reuse the tapes. This practice was due to the high cost of videotape at the time. While soap operas began routinely saving their episodes between 1976 and 1979, several soaps have saved recordings of most or all their episodes. In the '70s early consumer and semi-pro video tape equipment came along (the film *Auto Focus* features early tech). It really took off in the 1980s alongside the miniaturization of electronics in general and started a new boom of homebrew/garage media production. That's sort of what fed into what you perceived by the 1990s, and the aesthetic also matched the 80s/90s garage/grunge/punk/metal scenes back then. So while it was \"budget\" it was also cool. With a few thousand dollars in equipment you could create a show \"good enough\" (highly subjective) for late night cable access channels, or something you could create, duplicate and ship relatively cheaply and independently on VHS or Beta. That was a big deal. To reach a wide audience back then was very different than today. You couldn't just upload to youtube some random thing you caught on your cellphone cam. You had to (at a minimum) deal with a studio of some sort, a distribution company, possibly censors and \"suits\". However, it was a massive leap forward compared from before that. If you wanted an \"indie\" audience you might have to pitch your little 16mm indie movie to the local theater owner, or enter it into a film competition or festival. Or sell it in the back pages of magazines. And anything \"mainstream\" generally had to go through all the layers of the big studios/distributors.",
"This is what is so cool about film. If I'm not mistaken, I believe large format film resolution has yet to be surpassed by digital - Can anyone chime in on that?",
"To expand on the explanations about film vs. video: It's not just cost, but mostly speed, ease of use and the overall cost of production. Film wasn't *that* expensive, but you needed a shit ton of it for motion picture. Remember 35mm film? That's 36 pictures. For motion, film is shot vertically on half the frame, so on that 36-image roll, you'll get 72 frames - with 24 images per second, that's 3 SECONDS. If you've ever watched a behind the scenes of some movie, you'd see cameras with those large bulky film canisters. Not just that, but whenever you need to do several takes or a reshoot, that's film wasted. Next, film needs to be developed. That requires people, dark rooms, chemistry... More costs and time as it always takes a few hours to days. Shooting in different lightning conditions? Gotta take different film stocks and change them as needed, together with lenses or just about entire cameras because that's faster. For a big budget movie watched at cinemas that's all worth it but for TV use that's crazy expensive. Remember TVs were like 12 to 15 inches at the time, with aerial antennas - the quality was ass anyway. So as soon as video became available, it was vastly preferred for TV work. Also to do any sort of trickery with film, you either had to *physically* manipulate it, or transfer it to video anyway. As an example, Star Trek TOS and TNG were shot, cut and edited all on film, so it was eventually possible to just rescan the film and release modern HD versions (TOS had some effects remade but the point remains). Voyager however, while also shot on film, had all effects made after transferred to video, and so for HD release those would have to all be remade from scratch.",
"This is true of film from the 30's versus film from the 40's, 50's, 60's. It depends on how well they were stored but for example if you watch the old Sherlock Holmes from the 30's they are crisp and amazing but then the Sherlock Holmes from the 50's is terrible. Was it a change in film quality? 70's to 90's I assume is because of the rise of video instead of film.",
"It's the film quality or the medium. Baraka was a 1990s movie shot on 70mm, They are rescanning it to 8 k but here is the original 1990s footage & #x200B; [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"Because it was taken on film. Film grain is *way* smaller than pixels, and is still a superior medium for photography. Only the most sophisticated and expensive cameras can approach it even today. [You might find this interesting.]( URL_1 ) [This]( URL_0 ) too.",
"They recorded on film back then. That film was scanned into a format useable for TV/Video. The original film can be rescanned at HD or even 4K quality if it’s still in good shape. Later, there was a move away from film and the master recordings were at lower quality but still sufficient for TV/Video at the time.",
"I'll dumb it down as much as possible: video records pre 80's 90's were physical, and physical camera have been around for awhile, meaning the technology has lots of time to improve (look at videos from the 30's compared to the 70's) Then digital capture came out, and the technology was new, meaning it was still at its starting phase before it got \"better\", like physical did. Hope that makes sense",
"Lots of comments about film being a superior medium and I fully agree. Here’s a link talking about restoring the 1977 Star Wars into 4K or higher, it’s a long video but he goes into decent detail and in context of something as culturally relevant as Star Wars URL_0",
"Because footage from the 70s is almost certainly on film which typically has a grain structure approximately equivalent to at least 1080p whereas footage from the 90s was almost certainly on VHS which also has resolution of a potato (480i)",
"In the '90s a lot of the content was recorded to be shown on TV. So there was no point in recording it on more expensive film media and could be recorded on magnetic tapes. Even high-quality content would look bad on a low-res CRT TV.",
"Something being left out of the discussion... A lot things shot on film in the '70s have since been restored; ie, we've taken the original negatives, scanned them, and digitally manipulated them (adjusted contrast, color, focus, etc.) to create a new master. While things shot on film in the '90s haven't degraded enough yet to call for restoration.",
"So old footage is recorded on film. Film needs to be scanned to be viewed off the reel. Who ever owns the film can keep rescanning the film as technology gets better to get higher quality video over the years. 90s era footage was recorded digitally, so whatever resolution it was recoded at, it will always be at that resolution forever."
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ivdk34 | how does headphone virtual surround sound in headphones work | Could someone help me understand because I don't get how you can make something sound from all around you using 2 speakers in static positions | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The answer you're looking for here is called HRTF, Head-Related Transfer Function. Put on some headphones and watch this video: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) The one obvious clue your brain uses to determine a sound's direction is the delay between sound arriving in both ears. That covers 360 degrees around you. But what about above and below? Your outer ear is not a simple tube and sound doesn't go directly into your ear. There's distortion in there caused by the ear canal's shape and of course your head getting in the way. If you play sound from your left but cover your left ear, your *right* ear hears it slightly muffled. That distortion, which can cause sound to be muffled or just slightly change shape, is part of the \"HRTF\", which is *all* the cues used by your brain to determine if a sound is: left, right, up, down, behind a wall, no obstructions, etc. They call it a \"head\"-related transfer function because it's all to do with where, the size and shape of your head, and the size, shape and distance of your ears. It's a function because for any given size shape an distance, we can fake the actual sound changes pretty well. Things like echo (far away) and lack of high frequencies (obstructed) also factor into how you interpret where a sound is coming from. All of these can be faked with just two speakers. The sound for the above video was made simply by placing two microphones next to each other with some sort of plastic dome to simulate a head, and doing all the actions for real. They explain it in the video at around the 2 minute mark. If the separation between the microphones or the fake head isn't close enough to your exact head, the illusion will be off because it's effectively as if you stuck your brain into someone else's body because you're hearing the results of a different HRTF.",
"The main ways that your ears are able to locate sounds is in the difference in timing between hearing a sound in each ear and the particular distortion caused by your outer ear which is directional. Both of these can be approximated in software by changing the timing and slightly modifying the sound signal sent to each ear."
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ive3en | How do they make doors? | How the fuck do they make doors? It baffles me to see a piece of wood fatter than any tree I've ever seen. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"They're made out of multiple pieces of wood glued together then planed flat and sanded so you don't even see the seam. Either that or they're made out of particle board which is a bunch of wood chips that are glued together.",
"[Here]( URL_0 ) is a segment from *This Old House* showing how doors are made in a factory. That piece of wood you're looking at isn't a single tree; read the grain to pick out the individual pieces from which it's made.",
"You know you can just glue a couple of pieces of wood together? Sand the fuck outta those rough bad boys. Wood Fill any spots left and sand that bitch again. Wrap it up in thin plastic to pevent minor scratches, smack a sticker on the bottom saying Made by Tina's Vegenas and sell that shit on the black market.",
"First of all, you have clearly never been to the Pacific northwest. There are trees you can drive through. Secondly, I can't not think about real fake doors from rick and morty, because it is very rare that a door is made from a single piece of wood. Even solid wood doors are planks glued together - so they are real fake doors. Most interior doors are basically sawdust glued into a panel, and then a 2\" framed wall around the interior of the 2 panels. making it light but functional. [let's just see where this goes]( URL_0 )"
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ivl2lf | I'm confused on frame rates and refresh rates | So if I have a PlayStation 5 that can apparently run 4k at 120fps and my tv is only 50htz would I then cap at 50fps? Or would it go up to 120? Versus if I played on a monitor that didn't have 4k support by had 1440 I obviously wouldn't recieve the 4k quality of a ps5? I am confused . | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Refresh rate is how many updates the HDMI port on consoles send to the display to update per second. Frame rate is how many frame of the game the system can render per second. The two in no way have any relationship to each other. It could be 3 FPS and 500 Hz, baring any syncing or intelligence. > So if I have a PlayStation 5 that can apparently run 4k at 120fps and my tv is only 50htz would I then cap at 50fps? Maybe. Unknown on the PS5 programming. If the PS5 can tell the display refresh rate is 50 Hz, it could cap at 50 FPS. More than likely, it won't. It will hit 30, 45, 60, 90 FPS or whatever the game runs at. Display will be updated at 50 Hz. Won't that be out of sync? Yes, absolutely. But every display is out of sync with every console. Faster rates, even if out of sync, mean you can get better response times as one part lining up with the other is quicker. The PS5 won't do 4K, 120 FPS. I absolutely guarantee this. All they mean by 120 Hz is it has an HDMI 2.1 port that can refresh 4K at 120 Hz. It will never render a game at 120 FPS. Why? Because you can look at PC hardware and see how ridiculous hard and expensive that is. PS5 would pull that off for a cartoon 2D game sure. The AAA games going forward might hit 30 FPS at 4K. Remember, the PS3 advertised HD gaming. Yet the PS4 game were still outputting 900p, that is short or 1080p or HD. Don't believe the marketing nonsense, 4K 120 FPS is not happening. Wait for the PS6 and AAA games might be pulling this off. > Versus if I played on a monitor that didn't have 4k support by had 1440 I obviously wouldn't recieve the 4k quality of a ps5? I am confused . 1440p monitor will look like dogshit. Why? Because the PS5 likely won't support 1440p. It will output 1080p to the monitor, and the monitor will upscale to 1440p. That will look horrible though, as your monitor is doing it on the fly and 1440p is not a clear multiple of 1080p. 1440p is double 720p. 2160p (aka 4K, marketing half truths) is double 1080p. 1080p to 1440p looks bad as each pixel of 1080p becomes a fraction of a 1440p pixel. PS5 will probably support 720p, 1080p, and 2160p (4K). It will probably render most \"4K\" games at 1440p, and checkerboard upscale. Why do I assume this? Because that's what the PS4 Pro does. As well, that's what the fancy PS5 Unreal engine demo did. 1440p rendering as that is the reasonable goal of < $1000 GPUs right now. Can the PS4 Pro output 1440p despite rendering it? No. I have one. I have a 1440p, 144 Hz monitor. would be excellent if the PS4 Pro or PS5 had the same function a PC or Xbox has, but sadly they do not. I'm very disappointed in Sony incompetency and would have an Xbox One X if it wasn't for friends and online gaming. I run it at trueb1080p with no upscaling, so it takes up a small box in the middle of my monitor, but thankfully since my monitor is large that's still equivalent to a 24\" 1080p. I can run it at full 1440p, but again the monitor upscales off a bad multiple, and it does not look great. I can assure you, absolutely do not buy a PlayStation and a 1440p monitor for the sole purpose of using them together. The results, all thanks to Sony end, are horrible. Why cant the PS4 Pro and more than likely PS5 based on everything Sony has said so far output 1440p depsite it being a common resolution and the very attainable goal of this generation? No technical reason, just Sony laziness and indifference from being market leader with the PS4 by a large margin. You can bet your ass Xbox One supports it. And you can bet your ass the SeXbox (both versions) already confirmed it. Sony has been silent, so that's a cold piss off you to anyone with a 1440p display. Now onto Sony failings again, Xbox actually support something called AMD freesync. This mean the display and graphics card actually talk to each other. Frame rate matches refresh rates and they sync at the exact same time. Minimum possible lag, no screen tearing half way through a frame being displayed getting an update. My PC supports this, and let me tell you, it's absolutely amazing. Could Sony support this? Absolutely, they use AMD. Will the PS5? Probably not, the cocky market leader laziness. Dynamic refresh rate syncing is truly next gen, but they left it out."
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ivo8zy | Why does a song sound better when played from a vinyl than from a cd? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two different things that might be going on. One is that what sounds \"better\" is subjective. What you're used to, what you grew up with, is going to sound better to you. There are people who grew up listening to MP3s compressed with a significant amount of loss but to them that sounds better. Think of the stereotypical old person ranting about how the music that the young'uns are listening to is just noise. We even have records about people in Ancient Greece complaining about the young generation. The other factor isn't because of the CD or digital file itself, but the mastering process and specifically the [Loudness War]( URL_0 ). A lot of times when music is remastered for CD or digital, they amplify the sound a lot so that there's less dynamic range, and often introduce a significant amount of distortion.",
"Because you are used to it. It is really as simple as that. If you have a chance, take a CD of your favorite song and go to a REALLY high end audio store and demo the song in their sound studio. You'll likely find that it won't sound the same at all - the details and dynamic balance might even sound odd to you. People are divided on a subjective matter of \"what sounds right\". But a reasonably good audio system will play a reasonably well remastered CD of a song with much greater fidelity (measured objectively wrt distortion and noise) compared to an LP played back on the same equipment. All LPs have (to an extent) distortions based on analog pickup and turntable speed variances etc (mechanical stuff). On top of that, all LPs have their analog signals recorded with what is known as the RIAA equalization filter. The turntable (or sometimes the amp) will de-equalize the RIAA filter to recover the original sound. Typically, this makes for what many call a \"warmer\" sound from LPs - but these are artifacts introduced by the media and equipment. When someone first hears the CD version of a song they know, it is common to hear it described as \"clinical\" or \"lacking warmth\". That sound is (objectively) probably closer to the original master recording. Some people will appreciate this while others will prefer \"their idea\" of the song when they first heard it on LP. Almost identical arguments are made by people who claim that \"tube amps\" are superior to solid state amps. And a lot of that appreciation is that tube amps inherently \"clip\" gradually and has a \"warm\" tonality. EDIT: I love tube amps too!"
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ivoas0 | What's the difference between value and saturation in colors? | I've watched so many videos and surfed around the internet, but I still don't get it. I understand that value determines the brightness, and saturation is about the dullness or intensity of a color. I think my inability to understand the concepts comes from me not being able to differentiate dull colors with bright colors, and intense colors with dark colors. In my head, I'm thinking that the brighter a color is, the more dull it is, and I know that's not the case, but I just don't udnerstand it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> I understand that value determines the brightness, and saturation is about the dullness or intensity of a color Ya. That's pretty much it. ...That's it. You've got it. Brightness vs color. Two different variables. You can have bright white paint with a little red mixed in giving a bright but mostly desaturated / dull / low-intensity color. You can have pure red paint... in the dark, so you can hardly see it. Bright and dull vs dark and intense. These are two different physical properties. Amplitude and frequency. Your eye has 4 receptors. Rods for [nightvision]( URL_0 ), which doesn't have color and gets over-ridden in bright settings so we're going to ignore it. And then there's 3 types of cones. Red, Green, and Blue. They respond more to different frequencies of light (there's a lot of [overlap]( URL_1 ) with green and red). When you see stuff, the cone nerves wiggle with an intensity equal to how many photons hit your eye. The is brightness, the amplitude of the lightwaves coming in. Depending on which cone nerves wiggle, you pick up what [frequency]( URL_2 ) the lightwave has. If the red cone nerves wiggle while the other cones don't, it looks red. If they all wiggle, it's a mix (and it's a grey-white light). Color is the differentiation between the cones. And a lot of light is a mix of frequencies. (And polarity, which we can't see at all)."
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ivon3j | Why are phone cameras so bad at capturing colour as we see it, and what can be done to correct it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"A phone camera, like other digital cameras, depend on lighting to produce a photo. There are settings on the phone that can be manually adjusted to change how the image will look. The human eye works differently in that it uses specialized cone and rod cells to detect light, which is used to send electrical signals to the brain and be interpreted as an image. For the phone cameras, some of the limitations of capturing an image can be due to either hardware, like the image sensors, or software. But, improvements in both can increase the likeness of a photo to its actual color."
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ivpadv | What did they use to edit images in order to make movies before the 90s? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’d use plastic film and basically cut/paste frames together. [Here’s a different but same ELI5]( URL_0 )",
"Scissors and glue. They'd take reels of film footage (a unit of length back when film had physical length) and find the frame with that \"action clack box\" which has the scene number in it. They take scissors and cut the film strip there. Or more like, they put the film in a jig made for holding it in place and hit a lever that cuts it cleanly. Then they glue two strips of film together, More accurately: they used a [splicer]( URL_0 ) which used film cement to glue to two strips together. Keeping the perfs aligned for the sprockets was important, those holes on the side of film that physically pull it forward. For video effects, there was a whole profession of altering images. Like carefully shining light on the film to darken out sections. I believe that's where \"dodge\" and \"burn' come from. Or taking a tool and rubbing the film to blur the image. For movies, it's repeating this for EVERY frame. For things like rotoscoping, they would project the image into a paper, paint the paper as they wanted from what they see, and then take a picture of the paper as a single frame in the movie. Labor intensive as hell. And that was considered the \"cheap\" way of doing it."
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ivpudc | Why do we get eye strain from staring at a screen for a long period of time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Eye strain from digital screens is primarily caused by low contrast, your eyes constantly shifting focus and moving to look at different parts of the screen, and the brightness of your screen and room, plus occasional glare and reflections. Blue light has a bad reputation because it causes you to stay awake the most out of all of the other wavelengths of light, but not by a large margin. It is by no means dangerous to you nor causes eye strain more than the others."
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ivq39d | Where are the layers actually present in protocols like TCP/IP or OSI? | I recently studied the OSI model which divided the networking process into 7 layers where every layers adds onto the previous layers work. Please explain how and where in the device is this followed before the request is sent out from the device!! Basically I just want to know how and where does the layering happen in the backend. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"I saw others explaining in detail, but you were asking for examples so I'll try to chime in to make it (possibly?) easier. It's late and I'm super tired, but... maybe this will help if I give a few examples. I'm going to use CIDR notation in the examples, so I hope you've got that down. If not, I can explain it later. Layer 1, like the other guys, is just physical, like the network cable mentioned. You'll only ever deal with this when plugging stuff in. If you have a Layer 1 problem, it's usually a matter of a bad cable, bad port, a physically loose connection, etc. Layer 2 is actually how packets move around. It uses MAC addresses as the destination. If your computer (192.168.0.10/24, let's say) wants to talk to another computer (192.168.0.20/24 to continue the example) on the same subnet, it sends out and ARP to ~~the broadcast of your subnet~~ ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (EDIT: /u/fractalbrains reminded me that ARP broadcasts aren't restricted to the subnet's broadcast address) saying \"HEY! Who is 192.168.0.20?!\" and that computer that matches that IP address will respond with \"I am! My MAC address is ff:dd:cc:bb:aa:00 (or whatever).\" Your computer will now take that MAC address, put it into the packet header, and send it out, directly to the target computer. Assuming that both computers are plugged into a switch, the switch will see the incoming packet from your computer, and it knows the physical port that ff:dd:cc:bb:aa:00 is on, and it will just shove that packet out that physical port to the destination computer without any routing calculations. Layer 2 is usually very fast, and very low overhead on the switch. Layer 3 is routing. When you're trying to reach a destination outside of your local subnet, your computer can't just ARP broadcast and expect to receive a response, so it instead looks to it's routing table. To modify the earlier example, let's say your destination is 192.168.100.20/24. Since that IP isn't in your local subnet, it won't ARP for it, and will instead look at your routing table. If you don't have a route directly for that destination subnet, your computer will instead hand the packet off to the default route (in this case, probably 192.168.0.1, the first IP in the subnet, most commonly the default route, also called the gateway). The router will receive the packet from your computer, look up the destination ip in it's routing table, and forward the packet along to the next hop (either directly to the destination if it's plugged into a port on that router, or the device defined in the routing table if it needs further routing beyond the first router). Layer 4 is your port information. This requires an active listener on the destination, like a webserver running to answer port 80/443/etc, an ssh daemon listening on port 22, a telnet server listening on port 23, etc. For TCP, the port is a mandatory part of the packet header. When your computer creates the packet and sends it out, it will open a port (almost always a random high numbered port number) so it can listen on that port for the reply. Layers 5-7 aren't really useful in day to day network admin/engineering, so don't worry about that yet. Layers 2-4 are the meat of TCP, 99% of what you do will deal with those layers."
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ivrtsp | What is SBMM (Skill Based Match Making) and why does everyone hate it? | I'm specifically talking about Call Of Duty. The community seems to hate SBMM but I just don't get it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Skill Based Match Making is an attempt at making sure that new players aren't thrown into games with professional gamers, leading to many noob deaths and a frustration at the game. The concept is based on ranking systems for board games, where you are given a rank number based either on a skills test (Like playing a game of Go against a Master with a handicap) or based on your win/loss record against other players in general (You win about half the time against Jim, so you're about even. But you lose 4 out of 5 times to Sarah, so Sarah is better than you.) In the case of CoD, it checks for stats like kills per minute and kills per death. The controversy comes because SBMM prevents noob quashing (I know, ironic when that is the intent), as some good players get their jollies by killing noobs and looking like a real badass. They don't want the challenge. But it also means that a high ranking player can't go into a low ranking match to be helpful or just to dick around. That is, they are forced to play more competitively, and lose the casual aspects of the game.",
"It is suppose to put people of similar skills in the same match. But the problem is it is so easy to manipulate and mess with that more often then not the newer players are put up against veterans. Which causes very imbalanced matches. In CODs case they never actually fixed the issue with it making the community hate it."
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ivs0a6 | Why is that a half an hour video that I record on my phone has the same size as a movie file of the same quality which is three times as longer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"Your phone was recording, compressing, and encoding the video in realtime with a focus on quality rather than space which initially gives you a really large file Video compression is hard and takes a lot of computation time. If you have to save the file in nearly realtime then you can't spend much time compressing the file, but if you're reencoding a movie file for later distribution then you can take as long as you want to get that size wayyyy down without losing too much in quality. The best compression comes from being able to look at the differences between frames so being able to go back afterwards lets the software choose to use blocks that are shared by a huge number of frames (pale blue because half of the entire video is sky) rather than just by the couple it can work with at the moment because there's another one on the way. You could take the video from your phone, open it up in a video editor, reencode it into a much smaller file, wait hours-days, and then have a much much smaller file than you started with which will look very similar."
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ivukpi | Why did we never manage to standardize to a universal electric socket in the world? | There are so many different power sockets in the world, of so many shapes and sizes. Before you travel to any country you're gonna have to find out what socket they have and whether you have the right adaptor. Are there reasons why we haven't moved towards a universal socket yet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The real issue is that every country made their own standards for electricity close to a century ago, before international communication was easy, and before international travel would became relatively easy. So there wasn't a real reason for countries to work together, that wasn't a major priority. And now, switching to a universal standard would require most countries to replace everything, a massive and expensive undertaking that isn't seen as worth the effort.",
"To add to what /u/mugenhunt said, *interface* standards, where two parts connect, are especially hard to change. In 2007, I switched from a regular cell phone to an iPhone. Huge technological jump, and easy enough to do: I just bought it and it worked with the existing cell network. My friends were skeptical and kept their old phones: we gradually changed over one at a time as a personal decision. But suppose I wanted to switch over to British electric plugs, because they're supposedly better. I can't just buy a new laptop charger with a British plug, it won't connect to my house outlets. So I've got to change outlets. And since I want to plug it in everywhere in my house, I have to change *all* the outlets. But I've still got my old stuff I need to plug in too... so I need to replace the plugs on everything I own. Oh god this is getting expensive. But wait! I can't go down to the Home Depot and buy this stuff: they only sell American plugs and sockets. So now I've got to convince the Home Depot to carry two kinds of every outlet and electrical device they sell. But wait there's more! The British plug system works at 230 volts instead of 110. So either we need to invent a brand-new \"Amerobritish\" system that uses British plugs at 110 volts -- which is to say the solution to too many standards is to add a new standard -- or we need to REBUILD THE ENTIRE AMERICAN ELECTRICAL GRID to run at 230 volts. You see the same problem whenever parts connect together. Wrenches and sockets, driving on the right vs the left, communication networks: if A has to match B, you can't replace A without replacing B... and often that means replacing *all* the A's and all the B's."
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ivxrqp | What is DLSS and what makes it important to gaming today? | DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), when I watch videos about it, just sounds like a fancy way of saying "upscaling." I don't understand why upscaling is considered revolutionary these days. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's AI driven upscaling, which you already know. It's important in that instead of just stretching the image (say from 1080p to 4k) an AI tries to add some more detail that wasn't present in the original 1080p image (say some text that was a bit blurry would be sharper) in real time, which is great for gaming, because then the sacrifices of higher resolutions on framerate is lowered"
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ivxzbe | Why is it that the screen appears totally black for a laptop from some angles but not so for my TV? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When color LCD screens were being invented a few different kinds cropped up, the two most common are TN, which is more responsive, but has worse color accuracy, and has the poor viewing angles, and IPS, which has better viewing angles and has better color accuracy. On laptops, and cheaper screens in general you'll usually find TN, but on most good TVs you'll find IPS"
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iw01q9 | Nvidia Radeon simultaneous operation | I have purchased a laptop(yet to arrive) which has ryzen 4600h and gtx 1650ti, is it possible for the bulit in radeon graphics card to supplement the nvidia graphics card in gaming(or other graphics heavy task) or gtx will run standalone all the time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on how the game or program is programmed. For example, Blender will allow you to use both, but most games by default will try and use the dedicated GPU exclusively for rendering"
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iw0da7 | Do new smartpones actually have big technological advances over the older ones or do smartphone manufacturer just want to trick people whose phone is old/broken into thinking they need an upgrade? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The new ones are actually more advanced, so the are faster, have a better camera etc. But the question is if you necessarily need that. If you don't have a high amount of pictures and apps, you don't need the newest and biggest amount of storage etc. Also, as far as I know, phones are build the way that they get slow after some years, so the companies do their best to get you to buy the new models",
"mostly in processing power, also battery power but when the techs see there is more power to be used they eat it up again with processing. There are also a good number of smaller tech add ins depending on brand an model, but generationally the big difference is how much processing and graphics it has."
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iw4z03 | How do games like Among us suddenly blow up overnight and become mainstream with millions of downloads after two years of no real success? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most likely someone big and recognizable discovering the game, finding out it's a good game, and then other people that watch this guy play it, they like it, and a butterfly effect happens and now it's a big, popular game.",
"I believe that it was Twitch streamer sodapoppin that played the game with a few people and then later on invited more Twitch streamers to come play with him. Those streamers realised how good the game was and that it created good content so they also began inviting other streamers. Eventually it got big and the viewers thougth the game looked fun and also bougth it."
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iw52n7 | Why are internet speed tests always way faster than any speed I receive when actually downloading something? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So there are several things going on. 1) Read the fine print, you're paying for \"up to 100mbps.\" It's a subtle distinction but an important one. 2) ISPs market their service in megabits; speed tests and downloads themselves normally measure in megabytes. 100Mb = 12.5MB. 3) Just because you can download at 100mbps, doesn't mean the site you're downloading from -- or the networks between you and them -- can serve the content at 100mbps. 4) That 100mbps is \"at the pipe,\" and will be shared between all devices on your network. Roommate downloading the latest 30GB CoD update? That's going to eat into the available bandwidth. Sister running her camshow in the next room? That's going to eat into the bandwidth. If you've got a house full of people sharing 100mb, it's potentially going to go fast. 5) Wifi. It's convenient, but a 100mb wired connection will not give you a 100mb wireless connection, especially if there are walls, floors, etc between you and your wireless modem.",
"Also, the speed test is sort of an ideal situation ...its just your machine pinging a server back and forth without dealing with the infrastructure on the other side that you will encounter when you are actually downloading data / content",
"Applications downloading files measure their throughputs in Bytes per second, but speed tests measure in Bits per second. File sizes are measured in Bytes so that makes most sense for the file downloaders, but your internet speed is advertised and sold in Bits per second so that's what a speed tester reports. If you have 100 megabit internet then I would expect a peak of around 12 megabytes per second when downloading. That said, all ISPs oversubscribe unless you're paying like a thousand dollars per month for your connection. At certain times (eg: 8-10 pm) internet usage is at its highest and if too much oversubscription happens then you may peak out the connection. Oversubscription is like when airlines sell more tickets than they have seats on an airplane because they know a few people won't actually show up. ISPs know people don't use their internet connection at full speed all the time, just in random little bursts when they do things, and so can sell more capacity in an area than they could service. Maybe they only have 10,000 megabit to a neighbourhood, but sell internet access to 1000 customers at 100 megabit connections each rather than the mere 100 homes the math says they should be able to service.",
"Almost all of the speed test sites are operated directly or indirectly by the ISP's, so it's in their best interests to 'skew' those numbers so it looks favorable. I worked for an ISP for a dozen years, our tech support were instructed to get people to use certain speed tests while troubleshooting slow speeds....the speed tests were owner by them and the numbers were inflated heavily.",
"Another useful speed test is the one Netflix runs on their servers ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )). Its useful to see the real connection speed to something that's not directly peered to your ISP. I believe Netflix built that speed test site when certain ISP were suspected of throttling traffic to their servers. I understand this speed test connects to the same servers Netflix uses to send content so it's possibly closer to a \"real world\" test – of course a real world test to a very well architected infrastructure on the other end. Your mileage will vary with other sites even if you get good speeds at Netflix. Others have already pointed out that 100 mega bits per second will be about 12.5 Megabytes per second. Since the abbreviates are so similar it's often confusing.",
"Networking speeds are advertised and reported in bits per second, where as download speeds in applications are reported in bytes per second. 8bits = 1byte And also, just because you can get 100mbits_per_second to your ISP bode that's 10niles from you doesn't mean you get 100mbits_per_second to any location across the country or the world.",
"Isps prioritise traffic to speed test sites so they can get the best result for you. In practice all the QoS and traffic filtering services take their toll on your speed Source: work for a telco",
"Not quite ELI5, but I hope it’s useful. As far as I know internet speeds are advertised as connections from your devices to your choice of ISP (Internet Service Provider’s) servers. This doesn’t account for the fact that you won’t get the same speed with a wired connection than you would over WiFi (a lot faster through wired connection). Additionally, you have to account that when you’re downloading internet content or anything from a website you have to deal with the capacity of that server/website to send files over to your computer (downloading). Tip: If you want to have higher speeds I recommend to switching to a wired connection or consider switching to the new WiFi 6 protocol. Note: both the device and router must have the tech in order to make use of it."
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iw5vnu | How do those infrared thermometers work? How does flashing a red light on someones head give you their body temperature? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The red dot is just a laser targeting tool, allowing you to easily see what you are measuring the temperature of. They work by having a sensor that detects infra-red light. Everything gives off light, it is just that unless they are really hot, that light is too low in energy for us to see - it is infra (that is, below) red light. You can feel this, however, because it still shines on your skin, and is able to warm it up. The sensor detects the amount of a certain 'colour' of infra-red light that is being given off, and the hotter something is, the more light it gives off. From that, the computer inside the device can calculate and display a temperature.",
"The red light you see is only a part of what's going on. The red light is used to tell you two things: the thermometer is on and it shows you what you're pointing at so you know you're reading the right temperature. & #x200B; The actual temperature reading is done through different light that our eyes can't see. Infrared light is invisible, but we can feel it as heat. The thermometer is measuring the infrared light being given off by a person/food being cooked/whatever, and translates that to a temperature. Higher energy infrared is associated with higher temperatures.",
"So... basically everything you know is either wrong, incomplete, or basically oversimplified to the point of being basically a lie. Temperature as most people know it isn't a thing, not like a ball is a thing. You can't even measure it directly like one can count balls, bricks, or trees. What people think of as temperature is a comparative measure of energy. If an object is \"hotter\" then it's giving off a lot of energy and if it's \"colder\" it's absorbing energy. All a themometer is, whether we're talking a alcohol or mercury thermometer, is a calibrated tube where the expansion of the fluid as a function of internal energy (ie. temperature) is well known and marked off. IR thermometers aren't much different, in a fashion, but to get there we need to cover a few things. The energy you think of as movement is the same energy you perceive as temperature. The exact same. Suppose every atom in an object has the same amount of energy, and they're all headed in the same direction, it's called movement. If the energy in each atom is directed in a different direction, but it's insufficient to tear it apart, that's temperature. Basically, the more the atoms in an object jiggle, the \"hotter\" it is. Now, how does the IR thermometer work? Well... It's easier to visualize the jiggling action as if the atoms were bound together with springs. The more energy the atom has, the farther it will travel before it gets yanked back, and it will do so faster. Its position will move back and forth and that motion will be, more or less, repetitive... and it will cross the \"same\" place with a certain frequency. Now, the entire time it's moving back and forth, the atom is emitting a constant stream of photons and that stream will ripple outwards. Other atoms will catch some of those photons, absorb them, gain energy... and eventually shed other photons to lose it. So... visible light is just photons. So are microwaves, etc. The only thing that makes light visible to us is the fact the rods/cones in your eyes are exceptionally good at catching photons of a specific frequency range and the structures then translate that into a local electrical impulse that gets relayed back into your brain for processing. IR thermometers aren't really any different, really. It has a detector that's tuned for a specific frequency of photon emission that just so happens to be outside the frequency band we can see. So when you point the IR thermometer at an object, all it's doing is basically checking how \"bright\" the object appears to the detector. That gets relayed into other circuits, just like how your eye relays to the brain. The internal circuitry translates the detector's \"how bright\" into the displayed \"how warm\" by essentially doing a complicated chart lookup. The details are a fair bit more complicated than that and vary by model/manufacturer, but that's mostly in a \"Please God, can we avoid doing math today\" level nutshell. Much more than that and explaining it without a chalkboard or dry erase markers gets annoying."
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iw6vp0 | How is it that a Nintendo or Super Nintendo video game, with its graphics, its music and everything else, fits in a few kb when a single image or a single musical composition uses more than that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> ...a single image or a single musical composition uses more [than a few kb] This is a modern understanding of video games, where Call of Duty textures take up gigabytes of space. On the NES, a sprite is often 16x16. That's only 256 pixels of information to store. On top of that, because the technical limitations of the NES, a pixel could only select from so many colors. I believe techniques were often used to select a color from a palette, which would require less space than storing the raw color data itself. Rather than a byte to store the exact color for a pixel, you could select from one of four colors with just 2 bits. That would make Mario's 16x16 sprite take up 512 bits - about 5% of a kilobyte - if you stored it this way. Similar considerations are made for music. Actual music files are quite large as you have to store all the tiny, tiny, tiny information picked up in the recording. But video game music back in the NES/SNES era wasn't recorded. They used a standard called MIDI where instead of the game storing and playing back an audio file, it would store the notes of a song as well as the instruments/other info about these notes. It was very space efficient to store what was effectively sheet music and reconstruct it on the fly, as if playing the instruments, as opposed to storing and just playing back the chunky audio files. There are so many more examples of this ruthless and necessary efficiency in this era of game development that is totally lost nowadays. I would recommend doing some YouTube binges about this topic as it's incredibly fascinating how these game creators were able to do so much with so little.",
"In addition to what everyone else is saying, the creators (I feel bad calling them developers, since they were designers, developers, artists and sound engineers) of those games were fucking wizards of artifact reuse. Like the bushes in Mario are just recolored clouds. This blew my fucking mind when it was first pointed out to me. URL_0",
"For two reasons. One, those games are really really basic when you think about it, basically just telling what pixels to become what colors, not super duper in depth. And the sounds are all pretty monotonous. While music files thatre high quality are very very in depth, you can hear every little sound made in the recording, that attention to detail requires extra data. Reason two: they had to be that way. Storage data back in the day was Very Hard to keep smallish/portable. Really the only why to keep data storage small was to keep the data you’re trying to store small too. So programmers were restricted by what they were working with. And because of that had to make the game very efficiently. Modern videl games don’t have the problem, which a lot of people think is kind of a bad thing, because it leads to big triple A games not being done great and then taking up 100+ gbs of storage (looking at you CoD)",
"Let's start with an old nintendo first Say you have a box. The box holds 256(8 bits worth) marbles. Each box representation one dot that you can see. A old tv will have around 300,000 of these boxes used to make the display. For modern (1080p) display it each box must hold 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 marbles. So the box is much bigger. Also there is 2,073,600 boxes now. So not only are the boxes much bigger there are more of them. This also happened with sound and all other aspects of computing and is the reason everything is larger now.",
"Another reason: The game only stores the source material for what it displays, but the image or the recording has to be able to store anything no matter how it was made. The Mario game has a picture of Mario in it, but the recording of you playing Mario has to store Mario every frame because it doesn't know it's based on the same picture every time. For the sound, the Mario game has a list of commands like \"white noise for 0.1 seconds, beep at 440 Hz for 0.1 seconds, silent for 0.1 seconds, ...\" but the recording of the game has to record the actual sounds. It can't turn the beep sound back into the beep command. Also if the sound that comes out of the game isn't a perfectly shaped beep, it has to record the imperfections in the beep, because it records what is actually there, not what is supposed to be there. Even if it could reverse the beep and store the command, it would have to be \"beep at 440Hz for 0.1 seconds, but the beep is slightly distorted like this: < a bunch of numbers to remember the exact amount of distortion > \""
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iw7e7m | How come 4K video takes up gigabytes of storage, but watching 4K videos on YouTube doesn't require downloading gigabytes of data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"4K video from Youtube uses 13.0-51.0 Mbps which is 95-385 MB per minute or 5.5-23.0 GB per hour. Factor in compression which shrinks the videos, and watching it in windowed mode significantly reduces the size of the video. Youtube will automatically adjust performance based your available bandwidth as well. Another thing to consider is that services like Netflix and Youtube use caching services like Akamai which store commonly used data on server at the ISP so it doesn't have to be pulled directly from Youtube everytime. This greatly improves performance and reduces bandwidth usage on the ISP side.",
"Because you don’t download the entire YouTube video. You’re streaming it. The data for the video is never actually on your computer, instead the website, this case YouTube, is sending the data for the video to you in little chunks, which get displayed for you to watch and then don’t get sent anywhere. If you were to actually download and save the video to your computer, then it would take up gigabytes of storage, that’s just not happening when you watch videos normally."
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iwai8r | Why do OLED displays show individual RGB Pixels whenever they get wet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The water drop acts as a magnifying glass since it’s lens-shaped. The pixels are small so you only see them when magnified"
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iwdx9q | Why do/did soap operas appear so drastically different from other forms of tv? | Why do they look and sound differently? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My understanding is they're filmed and edited differently due to the quick turn around required. They have significantly less time to polish the turd when compared to larger shows that only come out once a week.",
"Motion interpolation is what causes the visual look of soap operas. It’s even called “the soap opera effect”. Basically you’re adding additional frames of filming to compensate for using cheaper less expensive video",
"1. On many shows, they will film the same scene multiple times with cameras and lighting at different angles. For instance, two people talking to one another, they'll do shots from behind person A with person B lit, behind person B with person A lit, and then both in frame with them both lit. Soap operas will just flood the scene with light and do all the shots at once. 2. Soap operas were traditionally filmed on camcorders with video recording rather than studio cameras with film recordings. This allowed them to quickly get cameras into positions for shots, but it also meant that they filmed at 50 or 60 fps (depending on europe or North America). The difference in recorded frame rate makes it look a little different.",
"Someone will surely correct this if wrong, but I was always told it was due to being shot with tape instead of film, like most of the nighttime dramas were. Film has a smoother look, while tape had more of a news clip feel. For comparison: MASH was shot with film; The Cosby Show was shot with tape."
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iwh2cq | Why can you get addicted to video games or social media in general? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They release reward chemicals like dopamine very similarly to the way that drugs do Playing a videogame or getting likes on social media, gives the user a sense of reward, and then in turn creates a craving for more of that feeling We can technically get addicted to anything we enjoy a lot",
"Our brain rewards us when we do things it likes. It has a [Reward System]( URL_0 ). Meaning, you get the urge to do something (like being hungry), then you do that something (eating), and your brain then makes you feel good. When you feel good after eating, it's not the food that does it, it's your brain. The action of wanting something and then being rewarded for that something can become an addictive behavior if it harms the other areas of your life. This is why gambling can be addicting. It's not the money, it's the feelings you get (but money helps this. If you remove money, a gambling addict won't get the brain reward). This is how most addiction, that doesn't involve putting other substances into your body, works."
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iwpdz5 | Why can’t we just make blood? Or better yet why can’t we make a blood replacement that is more efficient? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's too complicated. Blood is made of live cells: * Red cells handle the transport of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and they do this by reacting, one atom or molecule at a time, and taking the oxygen and/or carbon dioxide inside the cell, to transport it. Oxygen specifically it's very reactive, it rusts materials, it burns them, it reacts very easily, so the red cells use complicated organic chemistry to \"transport it safely\" and deliver it to the cells in your body. * White cells deal with intruders and infections, detecting all sorts of foreign bacteria, and eating them, and otherwise identifying the cells in your body correctly, and not hurting them. * Blood has platelets and other organic compounds that make it clot, when you get a cut the blood clots / hardens, blocking the cut and more blood from seeping out. * Blood transports hormones, nutrients from your digestive system, byproducts of digestion to be taken out by your kidneys, etc. It's just too complex; we don't have chemistry that's complex enough to handle all these functions with just chemicals, and we don't have the biology that's advanced enough to create designer blood cells to handle these functions.",
"We are trying and 2 products have made it to widespread human trials as far as I know. Diacyl-cross linked Hemoglobin and HBOC. Each increased mortality (medical speak for “probably killed people”) when they were tried. Evolution is pretty damn good at figuring out complex solutions. Edited to close parentheses",
"Most cells are incredibly complex nano-machines. Or rather, an incredibly complex micro-machine made up of nano-machines. Human engineering of nano-scale technology is in its infancy right now. Most of the things we're constructing are based on a single principle or function in a natural process of biology. In order to build a blood cell that could even match up to our own, we would need to build something that can function for 100-120 days of circulation and constant use, without failure. And hemoglobin alone is a complex chemical. In order to perform its function, it has to hold onto O^(2), but not too tightly. It's essentially the only molecule that can do the job in the human body that we know of, because we've never used anything else. In order to create it, we need to actually understand how the body does so, and that is one hell of a process. > Hemoglobin (Hb) is synthesized in a complex series of steps. The heme part is synthesized in a series of steps in the [mitochondria]( URL_8 ) and the [cytosol]( URL_3 ) of immature red blood cells, while the [globin]( URL_11 ) protein parts are synthesized by [ribosomes]( URL_4 ) in the cytosol.[\\[36\\]]( URL_12 ) Production of Hb continues in the cell throughout its early development from the [proerythroblast]( URL_2 ) to the [reticulocyte]( URL_0 ) in the [bone marrow]( URL_9 ). At this point, the [nucleus]( URL_1 ) is lost in mammalian red blood cells, but not in [birds]( URL_5 ) and many other species. Even after the loss of the nucleus in mammals, residual [ribosomal RNA]( URL_6 ) allows further synthesis of Hb until the reticulocyte loses its RNA soon after entering the [vasculature]( URL_7 ) (this hemoglobin-synthetic RNA in fact gives the reticulocyte its reticulated appearance and name).[\\[37\\]]( URL_10 ) Suffice it to say, we're a long way from building anything like this in mass quantities.",
"Life is a bloody genius when it comes to optimizing things like blood via evolution. It carries oxygen, CO2, nutrients, hormones, waste, immuncells etc. etc. Tackling one function would likely affect many others, and just a small negative effect on one parameter could be deadly...",
"Because our blood is already very effective in what it does it is the perfect middle ground. It gives us enough oxygen to live our normal lives and not too much to give us oxygen poisoning. And because there’s little cells in the blood that the body recognizes as it’s own and will view it as hostile if it’s not found, that is the reason why only certain blood types can give blood to other types",
"Doc here. We actually can make blood, but have a few difficulties 1. Executing the exact mechanisms that respond to changes in gradient 2. Eluding the immune system from killing it"
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iwprfg | How does a phone knows when a wireless/bluetooth device paired to it (e.g. Wireless earbuds) are turned on even through the phone's Bluetooth is turned off? | For example, everytime I wear my earbuds and forgot to turn my phone's bluetooth on, my phone will notify me to open my Bluetooth to connect to my buds. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It knows because your phone's bluetooth isn't actually turned off. It's merely in a low-power mode. It's called \"off\" in software (probably so users aren't confused and look for an \"off\" button that doesn't exist) but it's closer to \"hybernated\" in hardware."
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iwqoco | I understand that there are ABCDEFG chords but why aren't there any past that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So there are 12 notes that get named. ABCDEFG, those are the white keys on a piano, and the black keys are the sharps for CDFGA (in practise D sharp is called E flat, G sharp is A flat, A sharp is B flat.). After G, the notes go back to A, just up an octave. There’s no H note, so no H. chord. A through G are the only letters used to describe notes, therefore the only letters used to describe chords."
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iwrb86 | why does resolution technology for small screens and larges screens advance at the same speed? shouldn't making a 4k phone screens be much harder than 4k tv's screen, since the pixels are way smaller? | when a new resolution standard becomes popular, such as when "full-hd" and "4k" was new, they come to all devices at roughly the same time. this doesn't make any sense to me because a 4k phone has a MUCH higher pixel density then a 4k tv. example here: let's say aliens had the technology to make a "1 meter x 1 meter" screen with 4 pixels. logically they would also have the technology to make a "2 meter x 2 meter" screen with 16 pixel because they just need to use 4 copies of the 1x1 screen and put them together somehow. if they were to make a "0.5m x 0.5m" screen i would guess their limit would be only 1 pixel, that is they are even able to make a 0.5x0.5 screen with the 4 pixel 1x1 technology. but using our logic it wouldn't work like that, if we have the technology to make a 4 pixels 1x1 screens, we would also be able to make 4 pixel 0.5x0.5 screen, how come? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There is no point in making a TV or any other device capable of showing a really high definition if there is no content available at that resolution. That’s why higher resolutions always seem to stutter, we hear that they have been invented but they don’t appear as devices for a few years. There has to be a bunch of movies/shows made at that resolution before anyone will pay for a TV that can show it. Then devices of various sizes appear at more or less the same time. It was never about whether it was possible to build TVs with that resolution , it was about whether there was a market for them.",
"Your premise is wrong. The first 4k TV was released in 2012 -- > URL_0 The first 4k smartphone was released in 2017 -- > URL_1 That is a 5 years difference, enough time to minimize the tech."
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"https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-releases-first-4k-tv-the-84-inch-xbr-84x900/",
"https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/sony-xperia-xz-premium-launch-smartphone-worlds-first-4k-hdr-screen-gigabit-download.html"
]
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iwt12p | How is data transferred through a cable, ex. USB? | And I mean through the copper of the cable and the gold connectors. I’m assuming is all electrical but... How’s a data transferred through that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g62dw7q"
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"text": [
"One side turns the electricity on and off really fast and makes a specific pattern. The other side sees that pattern and processes it however it is told to. It is often shown to humans in binary 1’s and 0’s. [List of the most common patterns.]( URL_0 ) Notice at decimal 65 letters start."
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iwxfcu | How do powerline adapters work? What is the connection between powerlines and networks? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The power lines in your house are just copper (usually) cables which are designed to carry mains voltage to power devices in your house. While that's what they're \\*designed\\* to do, it doesn't stop them carrying other kinds of signal as well, so what a powerline network adapter does is to convert the network traffic into a high-frequency signal carried along the mains wiring; at the other end the adapter filters out the noise from the mains current and extracts the network signal. How well this works depends on how good your wiring is and how far apart the two adapters are."
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iwz7sd | what is double hashing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Hash functions are a type of function that take in a value and spit out a deterministic value where it is not really possible to know what the input to the function was given the output. These are great for obscuring sensitive information, creating an index on a table for faster lookups, and countless other applications. However, there is a potential problem. While the same input always leads to the same output, multiple different inputs can give the same output. This is called a collision. If input A and B both yield the same output from the hash function there's no way to tell if the input was A or B given the output. This is a problem because our system can't tell the difference between A and B (it only sees the hashed value). In this case we can utilize double hashing. In the event of a collision like that described above, you can pick one of the values, A or B, and plug the output of the first hash function into another hash function to create a new value. This lets us insure that every input value we plug in to our set of hash functions maps to a unique value."
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ix1rx9 | How can a speed limit be "photo-enforced"? Do you know I'm speeding because my car is blurrier than the car next to mine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They're usually wired to a radar sensor that triggers the photo. If you're travelling above the speed limit set on the sensor it will take a photo of the vehicle as you pass",
"They can have a regular radar gun connected to a camera. The radar gun clocks your speed. If you are speeding, the camera takes a picture of your license plate and fines your car from that.",
"The camera is hooked to a radar that measures every car's speed. When the radar detects a car going above the limit it activates the camera.",
"Modern traffic radar uses the Doppler effect. The device beams out low-power radio waves, of a specific frequency or set of frequencies, and detects reflections that bounce back from objects. If the object is moving toward the observer, or away from the observer, the reflection is compressed or stretched in wavelength. The device detects the difference in frequency and calculates the speed the object must be moving toward, or away-from, the device. The result is displayed to the operator. Usually, the device allows the operator to set a threshold speed, above which it sounds an alarm. That's naively how it works for a cop standing/sitting at the roadside. If the device is mounted in a moving vehicle, the device shows the difference in speed between the moving police vehicle and the target vehicle. It adds the speed reported by the police vehicle to the difference-speed that it detected, to display the true ground-speed of the target vehicle. The cop then decides whether any action is warranted. . . flip on the lights and siren, or keep cruising until a more egregious violation is detected. Some local governments sometimes mount a detector on a road-side post, along with a sign that displays \"Your speed is \\_ \\_ \\_ \\_ \" In that case, there is probably no cop nearby, the residents just want to make people aware how fast they are going in the neighborhood where their kids are playing or old folks are trying to get from the home to the early-bird special at the chicken joint. Alternatively, that same detector-on-a-post can be connected to a traffic camera. The camera takes a snapshot when a vehicle is detected exceeding a threshold speed, and the resulting photo gets metadata about the time-of-day and the date. Later the summons/bill arrives in the mail at the address of the person who is the registered owner of the vehicle. If they weren’t the offending driver, they are responsible to collect from the person who was driving at the time. It’s similar to how red-light traffic cameras catch you entering an intersection after the light has gone red. NB: The above describes RADAR (RAdio Direction And Ranging), but is equally applicable to units that use Lasers instead of radio waves for the speed detection."
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ix6ekp | Why does a washer-dryer combo use twice as much water when washing and drying compared to just washing? | Drying should be the complete opposite of using water... I'm looking at specification sheets of washer-dryer combo units and this seems to be always the case. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g64u71r",
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"text": [
"In a normal standalone dryer, the hot moist air from the dryer is either vented outside, or is run through a compressor to cool down and release the moisture. In a washer/dryer combo unit, they instead cool the air using cold water, since a water supply is already present on the unit.",
"It's mainly due to constraints of space inside the unit. The external dimensions of these machines are pretty much limited, and a decent capacity washing machine have limited extra space inside. Now when they put drying functionality in it, all that room is taken up, so the size of hot air hoses, condenser unit with water flow pipes is limited, so the drying cycle is less than optimal. They can't be made bigger to fit more stuff inside. Another factor is the design of tumble drum and paddles. Washing machines have small paddles to gently flip clothes that are submerged in water during washing, and they are smooth enough to bit damage fabrics when spinning at 1200+ rpm. Paddles inside a tumble dryer are much larger to maximize the exposure of at clothes to hot air, but they likely can't handle the forces required for washing and spinning. So combo unit wastes lot of time drying the outside of bundle of clothes since it can't effectively separate them nearly as well as a dryer with large paddles. In addition the drum of combo unit also have to contain water, so the pathways for air can't be as large as dedicated dryer. In conclusion, remember that modern heat-pump tumble dryers also take a lot of time as well (mine takes 3-4 hours for full 8kg load) but they are far more energy efficient than condenser or venting dryers."
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ix7n6b | What is the purpose git, git clone, and what are repositories? I know they have to do with code but what are they, what are they for, why do you need them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Problem #1: You are working on a coding project. You make some changes to your code, then after a while it turns out that your changes broke something. You want to revert your changes, but you can't, since you don't have the old code anymore. Problem #2: You and your friend Lisa are working on a project together. Each of you has a copy of the code, and each one is working on a different feature. How do you make sure your code is in sync with each other? Lisa could send you the files she changed whenever she makes any changes, but how do you make sure she didn't forget any files? What if you're both making changes to the same file? The solution is a Version Control system, also known as Source Code Management. Git is such a system. An SCM system does two main things: 1. It keeps track of all the changes in the code. Whenever you make a change and decide to \"commit\" it, the system will remember the state of the code before and after the change, so you can easily check the history or revert any changes. 2. It allows users to synchronize their code. The code is hosted on a shared server, and whenever someone wants to make a change, they \"push\" their change to the server. Then, other users can \"pull\" the change down to their computer. If there is a conflict (two users were working on the same file), they are forced to fix the conflict (\"merge\" the changes). A repository is the location where all the files, their histories and other metadata are stored. Normally, there is one shared repository stored on a server somewhere. In Git, every user working on a project has their own copy of the repository on their own computer. Whenever you make any changes to the code, you first make them in your local repository, and then push them to the shared repository, and every other user pulls the changes down to their own repository. Git Clone is a command that copies a repository between two locations - usually, from the shared server to your local computer. In order to work on a project and be able to contribute to it, you first need to clone it to your local computer. By default, `git clone < url > ` creates a directory under your current directory with the cloned repository. If all you want is access to the code, and you don't want to contribute to it or look at its history, then downloading the latest code is enough, without the need to clone the repository.",
"At its core GIT is for version control. The repository is all the code for whatever project you're dealing with. If you want to make a change you copy it to your machine, thats cloning. You make your changes, then update the repository with the changes by uploading those changes. Thats the basic gist without diving into how branches work. This allows your changes to be reviewed, allows others to work on the same code base without having to wait for your changes to be added, and keeps track of all changes in case something needs to be reverted (version control) The command line GIT CLONE whatecerURL is copying the repo to your machine"
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ix7t72 | How are Search Engines like Google and Bing made? How would you make one yourself? | How are search engines like google made and what technologies does one use to make one? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In the simplest sense they work similar to card catalogs did in the libraries back in the days of old. You send out a small program commonly called a web crawler or a spider. That program will visit websites, figure out what they are about, find tags to describe them, follow all the links it finds, and repeat. As the crawler goes across the internet your database of tags and what websites the tags apply to them grows more and more complete. Now you can open the actual search engine. When someone goes to your website and looks for \"funny cat videos\" you go to your database and find all the websites your crawler tagged with \"funny\", \"cat\", and \"videos\". The website will try to rank the results based on how relevant it think they are, and returns that to the user."
],
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ixaps1 | When new graphics cards get released for computers, what is different about them from older graphics cards? What gets upgraded to make them more powerful? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g65nnnk"
],
"text": [
"Generally, this boils down to smaller transistors. For example, the RTX 20 series cards from Nvidia were produced using 12 nm lithography, which means that each transistor was 12 nm wide. For their RTX 30 series cards, 8 nm lithography was used. This allowed Nvidia to pack more transistors into their cards, which means more compute power. There may also be some architectural differences,, which may be more efficient than previous generations."
],
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ixar7u | How can a computer estimate how long a process will take (like a render, copying files, installing software, etc.) and why is it almost always wrong? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The computer knows how large the task is, and it estimates how long it'll take based off the current progress Vs time taken, that number is changed everytime you do something on the computer, pulling processing power away from the task, that's when the estimation becomes erratic",
"Typically when the process is not comprised of a bunch of very similar tasks there isn't really a reliable way to produce an estimate. With files or installation, you could either use the number of files copied so far divided by the total number files, or the size of files copied so far divided by the total size. The problem is that the files are all of different sizes, and copying a hundred of 10 KB files is usually much, much slower than copying one 1MB file, so whichever metric you choose to use it's not a good estimate. When rendering, the rendering software typically divides the scene into tiles or \"buckets\" and uses the number of complete tiles divided by the total number of tiles as an estimate, but it runs into a similar problem: some tiles contain nothing but plain colours but some tiles have super complex transparent highly refractive objects that require a bajillion of ray casts to render correctly and it's difficult to predict accurately without making the estimation process waste way more time than it's worth."
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ixbdxp | How do pirates crack video games without access to the source code? Why does the method they use get rid of multiplayer capability? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g65r9pa"
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"text": [
"it depends on the method the publisher uses to authenticate a valid vs a invalid copy. these days games mostly connect to the publishers server and checks if the game is valid. so then the hacker can just block that connection or modify the game to connect to a dummy server that always returns a positive response, so in this method, multiplayer is by nature, not possible."
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ixcy4t | how does my walmart account know what I bought in-store if I never uploaded the receipt? | I went to my account to look at an online order I made and realized the items I purchased over the weekend were there. I did not scan and submit the receipts, and my information is never put into any system when I am checking out in-store. Is it linked by my debit card? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g662ue9",
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"text": [
"If your debit card is the sole piece of identification that links you to the purchase, then yes - Walmart is able to track the purchases you make using that card. You probably agreed to let them do that in the T & C of the online account when you signed up.",
"Only one person has your card, which is you. Only one account is linked to your card, which is yours. Therefore, any purchase made by your card is obviously you, and therefore can safely be associated to your account."
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ixe7dk | Being the first Blacksmith would have been hard. How did they get things from their forge before they made their first pair on tongs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Forging techniques came long after casting techniques, and a forge is just a modified smelter. So by the time there were blacksmiths forging iron, they had access to tools made via bronzesmithing. Bronze can be forged, but it has to be done cold and annealed. Bronzesmiths and blacksmiths also had access to sticks. Source: I worked as a blacksmith and did some bronzework as well after college. r/primitivetechnology may also be of help.",
"There was a progression from cast bronze and copper tools and weapons that people like the Egyptians used to carve the stones for the pyramids and temples. The iron age didn't just start from scratch."
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ixeb36 | How do network televisions and radio stations know how many people watched or listened their show/station? Does it work differently for satellite and over the air TV/Radio using an antenna and such? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g66habd"
],
"text": [
"Surveys.....because, yes, there is no way to know. Facebook and Reddit have both had minor scandals when it was revealed what portion of their traffic is bots (Reddit mostly.....this website has a surprising quantity of fake traffic). Everyone was like \"wow, that's a lot of bots\" until their advertisers, who pay huge fees for what they are told are targeted ads to real people realized that these sites actually know what portion of their traffic are not unique, real people but had been selling their click numbers as such. The advertiser might get charged per click but if Reddit knows 30% of their traffic is bots then as an ad-buyer, you would want that 30% back, right? As of right now the market kinda accepts it in a bit of an equilibrium but there is really no way for an online advertiser to know how much of the click traffic they are paying for is real, but the platform does. In theory, a platform can inflate this. I think right now the advertising world is just like \"We just don't want to know.\" This is one reason why big default subs sound like they have a lot of tedious, repetitive content because its not very hard to farm thousands or millions of alt bots by having them post regurgitated \"meta\" in these subs to build karma before being sold in bundles for way more money than new accounts."
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ixg978 | How does smartphones screen touch work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There is a layer in the screen assembly called the digitizer. It basically has an electric current running through it. When you touch the phone screen, your finger slightly changes the charge of that current. The phone recognizes that change and knows your finger is there. That’s why only some materials will work on a touchscreen, they all don’t affect the current the way skin does.",
"I stumbled on this video a few weeks back. Definitely will answer every question you may have, in an easy to understand video. You’re welcome URL_0 Added note; Time to get off reddit, had to wait 4 minutes before I could post this video."
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ixi814 | Why does DTH (Satellite TV) and internet stop working or slows down AFTER heavy rainfall? | I've observed whenever it rains heavily, with or without thunderstorms, the internet slows down or just stops working. Similarly, DTH TV connections either completely stop working or produce choppy images. Why does it happen ONLY AFTER heavy rainfalls? How do they fix it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g66xmnp"
],
"text": [
"Internet via telephone cables or internet via satellite? If via telephone cables, then you have places where the cable to your property have drowned, for example in telecom pits. There are two steps to solve this: Replace the affected part of the cable, and make the pits waterproof. If via satellite, then it might be that the dish isn't calibrated properly to the satellite or that it's just too much signal loss due to the rain for the signal to get through. All kind of transport mediums have their problems: rain affects radio, fog/air pollution affects laser links, pits full of water affect telephone cables. Fiber is generally unaffected, just keep the yellow diggers or men in orange vests with spades away from them."
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ixiij1 | How do keyboard matrixes work? | I'm reading [this]( URL_0 ) article on how they work but I can't make heads or tails of it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g6719ue"
],
"text": [
"All the keys on the keyboard need to be connected to the controller chip somehow so they can be read, but normally there are many more keys on a keyboard than there are pins on the controller to connect to. The matrix allows you to use far fewer pins for the same number of keys by organising them into 'rows' and 'columns'. If you think about a chessboard, a single square can be identified by its row and column; there is only one g5 square on a chessboard. Similarly, a keyboard can find out which keys are being pressed by giving a voltage to each of the 'rows' one by one and seeing which 'columns' it gets a voltage back on. If you give voltage to the 1st row and read voltage back on columns 3 and 5, you know that keys (1, 3) and (1, 5) were pressed down."
],
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ixis2b | —How does a thermal camera work? | How does a thermal camera is able to detect that a object is hot or cold? It got me puzzled. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"g6714kn"
],
"text": [
"Every object radiates electromagnetic waves which wavelength is directly dependent on the surface's temperature. Thus the wavelength of the (for humans invisible) light an object radiates can be mathematically translated to a temperature. The hotter the surface, the higher the frequency, e.g. the shorter the wavelength. Think of a camera but instead of recording light in the visible frequency range, we look below that, in the IR (infra-red / below red light) spectrum and map this information to a colormap humans can see on the screen."
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ixj1ud | when a domain is bought through a site like URL_0 or GoDaddy, who is selling it? And if it is a name that has not been registered before, on what basis are they allowed to to charge for it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"You may notice that domains end in stuff like .com or .uk or something like that. Each different way of ending is called a top-level domain (TLD). TLDs are usually run by an organization. Often it's run by a government or a government owned corporation for something like a .uk domain. Or a company that manages internet stuff like Verisign (they own .com and .net and a whole lot of other very common internet things) These companies almost always made a deal with several companies like GoDaddy so they do a lot of the grunt work with managing who gets what name, while they act as the authority to confirm that there isn't any conflict and do the work to get it online. So you pay GoDaddy, GoDaddy does a lot of the work sorting it out and pays that TLD, TLD does a lot of other work behind the scene. All of them made an agreement that if there was a real big dispute, they would let the courts handle it.",
"Think of domains like like phone numbers. You rent your phone number from your phone company, usually by way of a yearly contract. If you stop paying your bill, your number will get disconnected and after a while the phone company can issue that number to someone else. The same is true of domain names, you just rent these for as long as you keep paying the bill. Like phone numbers, governments usually set up the system and then let others manage the day to day running of that system. In this analogy, the government say that there can be telephone numbers beginning with 01, 0800, 07 etc. but then telephone companies are responsible for leasing these numbers to customers. With domains, Nominet are in charge of all .uk domain names but generally companies like Godaddy sit between you, the customer, and Nominet. If you want to register URL_0 you go to Godaddy, they tell you how to much to pay to lease the domain for a year, you pay and then they register the domain, in your name, with Nominet. Domain providers can, as far as I am aware, charge what they like to register and renew domains. If a domain has already been registered, it can not be leased to someone else unless the original registrar does not renew it after the lease expires. After the domain expires, it is usually locked for 90 days so that it does not work (any web site or email addresses attached to it will not function properly) and can only be renewed by the person who originally leased it. After 90 days the domain goes back on the open market for anyone to register. Time lines vary for different domain extensions e.g. .com, . URL_1 etc but that’s essentially how the system works.",
"A fundamental concept about the Domain Name System (DNS) is that the *protocol* is not owned by *anyone*. Same way the concept of the entire English language isn't owned by anyone, etc. DNS *as a protocol* is, in a thick nutshell, just a big fancy list that pair human-readable names (web domain addresses) to machine-usable names (IP addresses), and a bunch of rules that dictate the chain of command of whose list you can trust when you have multiple machines. To break that down a a bit... when you type \" URL_0 \" into the browser of a computer that has never been to that website before, it doesn't know where the server with that webpage is at. It needs an IP address, not a wordy name. So it asks a computer it trusts if it knows where to find it. If that computer doesn't know, it can ask a computer it trusts to know. And so on, and so forth, until you get to the computer that literally wrote the rule for it. This chain of command and the way computers ask each other like this is the DNS. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is, at this time, the entity that gets to decide who owns what website, as they are also the overseers of the world's largest DNS network via their subsidiary, the (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). If you want a website to point to the IP address for your server for everyone who looks up that address with ICANN's DNS system (which is almost everyone), you basically need to ask them permission. They need to voluntarily update their system so that everyone who comes knocking asking for the IP address to \"yourcooldomainwebsite.whatever\" will be told to go to your server's IP address. How do you do that? You pay them. Costs a lot of money to basically run the public Internet, gotta fund it somehow. Except, you probably won't pay them directly. You will likely be going through a domain registrar like GoDaddy, who acts as a middleman wholesaler. Why do these places exist? Because ICANN can't reasonably handle listening to every little request to buy a web domain around the entire planet, so they delegate that job to wholesalers. A big key word in that description of ICANN is that they own the *largest* DNS network. They don't \"own\" DNS any more than Merriam Webster \"owns\" English. You can actually choose to trust whoever you want to feed you DNS information. It's merely that basically every device, operating system, and piece of software that has the ability to choose who it trusts tends to come pre-assumed to trust ICANN for this information. You don't *have* to trust ICANN. I mean, there's a huge laundry list of reason why you probably *should*, but you don't *have* to. You can trust whoever you want. And whoever is the root of the system you end up trusting is effectively in charge of that big list of who owns what website. The point in me bringing this up is that the question was asked in the context of \"What gives whoever is on top *the right* to charge for owning a web domain?\" The simple answer to that, is that the system we live and work in is bathed in a general assumption that ICANN (or anyone who preceded them) was in control from the beginning. When you buy a new Windows PC, for example, it comes preinstalled with a list of certificates it trusts, signed through some chain of command back up to ICANN. Whenever you connect to a network, and you ask the local DNS authority to tell you what's what, you basically assume that authority has some chain of command back to ICANN. And if you don't trust them, you can verify it for yourself, and it will pretty much always be the case. So, ICANN has the authority to charge because... well, we let them do it. Nothing is stopping anyone from throwing their hands up in the air and starting their own root DNS authority. There are already [a few relatively notable alternatives]( URL_1 ). But good luck getting anyone to use (and more importantly, *trust*) you to keep it running, and keep it running better than ICANN. You either play by ICANN's rules to get into their system, or you toss away your access to the overwhelming majority of people who trust ICANN to tell them where websites are.",
"There is an agency that oversees the naming and records if names for the internet (icons or iana). When you initially pay, you are paying to establish your domain. If someone else owns the name, you need to work out the sale with them, then the database can be updated to show you as the owner, like registering your motor vehicle. Beyond that, when you pay your host, you are paying them for the space your sites takes on their servers (like cloud storage) there are fees that also cover the annual or bi annual fee to maintain your ownership, again like registering your motor vehicle. The agencies that oversees the naming are nonprofit so there are no crazy fees for it. If you want to start a website, shop for your host or registar."
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ixjedr | What is the difference between Metadata and Data? | Particularly in regard to Australia's laws on data/metadata retention by Australia's National Security organisations. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Metadata is data about the data. For example, you make a phone call. The phone call and conversation itself is data but who you called, from where you called, how long you talked etc is the metadata.",
"If you had a breakfast this morning and you wanted to share it with someone . You would tell them what you had right? Toast, bacon, eggs, maybe some baked beans. This would be the 'data'. The information you wish to share. The metadata is all the information behind the scene. How did you have it? The plate size, the colour of the plate. With a knife and fork? You hands? This is the metadata. A common example in computer science is a photo. The data is the actual imagine you wish to share. The meta data is the size, lenses type, date, location",
"You have a text file with some notes. The content of that file - the text - is your data. The information about that file - the size, the location, the creation date, the date of its last modification - is your metadata."
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ixjg85 | Keeping a laptop/phone always plugged to the power outlet kills the battery? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, it does not, for a couple of reaons. Firstly, battery charging circuits in your devices are smart enough to protect the battery from overcharging, including limiting the maximum capacity to \\~70%. When you plug in your device, power from the outlet is directly used for powering the device and for charging the battery. And hence, you don't \"discharge and recharge\" the battery at the same time, which is not possible. So, **it's a myth that charging and using your phone at the same time destroys your battery**. It doesn't. Secondly, it just doesn't work that way. Batteries have a specific voltage curve and a specific voltage where it's fully charged. For lithium-ion batteries, it's 4.2V. This voltage is referred to as the nominal cell voltage. When plugged into a power adapter, the circuitry of your device steps down or up the power into the required voltage, for example 4.2V. When batteries reach that voltage, load and supply voltage will both be equal to 4.2V, and no current will flow into the batteries. **In simple terms, batteries will stop charging on its own** provided a constant voltage source. This is what's referred as trickle charging. This basically means that overcharging (charging over the capacity of the battery) is not a thing, unless you're doing things completely wrong (like using a wrong charger for an unprotected battery). If you charge a 12.6V battery with a 15V power supply, the battery will pull current even after the battery reaches above 12.6V. That is overcharging. **A simple analogue:** Voltage is like balloons and air pressure. Let's say a balloon with 10 PSI of pressure is full (and putting more pressure will burst (overcharge) it. You can fill balloons with an air compressor (charger), but if the air compressor can only put out 10 PSI, then the pressure will equalize and the balloon won't pop no matter how long you're running the compressor."
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ixl7do | Is there a way to learn which sirens 🚔 🚑 🚒 are which? Like a general guide? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It really depends on if your local or state governments decided to make siren use standardized. If you want to learn about sirens I suggest looking up police suppliers online and learn about the different manufacturers of sirens, Whelen, Federal Signal, Code 3, etc... Then look them up on YouTube and listen to what they sound like."
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ixmhmq | Why do so many customer support lines say "We're experiencing higher than normal call volume" when it they say it every time I call? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because there are QUITE A FEW less people working those call centers than you might imagine. It's easier to tell you they're busy as opposed to only having like 3 people on the phone",
"Yes its new norm just because they dont want to hire more support. When i was working as customer supp we had approx. 4 sec waiting time between calls on normal day in team of 30 people. When some shit hits the fan i remember 40 min waiting queue for incoming calls. Its insane job and im glad af i quit.",
"Customer service is lying 'oh I'm so sorry that happened' means 'oh another one' 'oh that's strange we've not had that complaint before' means 'ah the damn sparkomatic's are sparking again, 50th time today, can't believe these suckers keep buying them and I have to pretend this problem is new for the 49th time' Oh sorry we don't have a bathroom means 'we do, but not you for you' 'we're expieriencing higher than normal call volume' means 'by reducing staff numbers to a well below adequate amount and overworking them we ensure that we wring every last penny out of these staff, they never have any 'dead time', dead time is dead profits. Sure it screws folks trying to call us, but they're the problem customers anyway so screw em' Which makes you feel better?",
"It serves as a psychological strategy. Its kind of like when you go to a busy restaurant and put your name in for a table. You usually ask “what is the wait?” The host/hostess is instructed to give you an estimate that is usually about 10 minutes longer than what they think. Lets say they tell you its about a 20 minute wait. Then when your name gets called 10 minutes later, you are in a good mood. Lets imagine that wait actually took 30 minutes. You are more likely to be upset by that point, shading your entire experience in a haze of dissatisfaction. Now, had you been originally told it would actually be a 35-40 minute wait, that true 30 min wait would have been a good experience. Our expectations play a big part in the level of satisfaction in our experience. Usually people calling a customer support line are already in a state of frustration, so anything that can be done to psychologically ease the mood of those callers is worth it.",
"The system is set up to play that message anytime the \"Average Wait Time\" is higher than a certain threshold. Let's say it's 5 minutes, but it can be any number they pick. Staffing is very hard for phone centers, as you have to schedule enough people to man the phones, but not too many, as you are wasting money at that point. So you do the best you can, but the difference between 1000 and 1200 calls an hour is substantial, but hard to predict. And all it takes is a newspaper article or a YouTube video or something you didn't anticipate to turn that 1200 calls per hour into 3000 calls per hour because people are freaking out about something. And the other issue is that the phone center may be purposely trying to save payroll costs and deliberately understaffing, but they do get measured by how long the average wait time is, how long the average call time is, and how happy the callers are with the resolution they were provided, and how polite and friendly the call center rep was. That's why you'll often get asked to do a survey after calling. But sometimes management doesn't care as someone is screaming about budgets in their staff meeting and so they have to take the hit on that and keep payroll down.",
"To set caller expectations. If someone knows it's going to be a long wait they'll somewhat less likely to either hang up or be as agitated when their call is finally picked up. Additionally with more companies shifting towards online support, trying to scare them with a potentially long wait may convince them to pursue that online support. Customer reps are able to respond to a much higher volume of inquiries via email/online support than they are taking calls, so it's a money saver.",
"The ELI5: They are lying. The LPT: To avoid companies that do this, before you buy their product or sign up for their service call their support line and see how long the wait is."
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ixqm87 | What makes early techno like The Prodigy so technically difficult or impressive? | The discussion in this video's comments are difficult to understand for anyone who is not technically versed in music production: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) What made tracks like this so impressive to create back in the 90s beyond just a lack of plugins and better software? How is it any different from the decades of music production before it by other bands? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s the creativity and ingenuity needed to make these songs in the 90’s that makes them technically impressive. Most (if not all) electronic music back then was made on hardware that were both expensive and had very limited possibilities (when compared to what you get with today’s hardware or software). IMO this what makes it so impressive."
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ixqs3v | how does an old television cause an entire village to lose its WiFi signal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It is explained in the article, \"After carrying out a plethora of tests, engineers had a theory that the problem could be caused by a phenomenon called single high-level impulse noise (SHINE), in which an appliance emits electrical interference that impacts broadband connectivity.\" Older CRT TV's were not shielded to prevent EMI (electromagnetic interference) very well or at all. There was no need back then because we didn't have the plethora of high-frequency devices we have today (wifi, cell phones, bluetooth, even 80's-90's cordless phones). Basically, the TV's interference was acting as a jammer, unintentionally of course."
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ixqtmn | why does it cost so much to put people into space? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"1. Escape velocity is a thing 2. It requires a lot of fuel to accelerate a stationary object to the escape velocity needed to get into space 3. It requires even more fuel for every pound of material you want to send into space (because it will take more fuel to create the higher energy to push the larger mass to that same escape velocity) 4. Rocket fuel is fucking expensive",
"Putting people in to space really isn't the expensive part. It's the getting them back down safely that really adds to the cost."
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ixrtcz | Why do games look choppy at 24fps but movies look fine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Movies are recorded at 24 FPS and played back at 24 FPS. Any motion that happens in that 1/24th of a second when recording results in blurs on the recording, so when we play it back, we get motion blur like we expect. With computer graphics, you draw 100% pristine frames every time with no motion blur, so when it's played back at a low FPS, you can see the choppiness.",
"Motion blur. A videogame creates a series of static photos, without motion between them. Meanwhile, a movie captures real life motion, so the motion in each frame is slightly blurred. This blur makes the motion feel less choppy."
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ixtjpf | Why do download speeds always seem to drop-off towards the end of a download? | It seems like any time I download a file, it always slows to a complete crawl for the last few percent of the download. When downloading a game through Steam for example, I can get speeds of up to 30MB/s, but the last 5ish percent of the download seems to take as long as the preceding 95 percent. Why is this? I have a couple basic PC repair certifications, but this is one thing I've never understood. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Next time this is happening in Steam, open the downloads page and check if it’s actually showing high usage for Disk instead of Network. Generally once the actual downloading is finished, it can still have to decompress some files or move them around to different places, so it doesn’t show the download as complete (implying the game is playable) until that last step is done too.",
"Often downloads gets split into multiple connections. So at the start you would get 10 times 1MB/s but at the end only 1 isn't done yet causing the speed to drop.",
"When you still need the whole file, the computer can download any part of the file at the highest speed it can. But towards the end, it only needs the files it doesn't have. Think if you were taking handfuls of rice from one container to the next without being able to pour it. Once you got to the bottom, you are having to pick up individual pieces of rice if you want it all (which you do)"
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ixtr2d | what is a tv license? | I keep hearing some British Youtubers complain about paying for a tv license. What is it? How is it different than paying for cable? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In the UK, Brits pay a tax for having a TV. This was a way of making people who had a TV pay for the BBC. It was a way of creating a taxpayer funded TV station without having people who didn't own TV's bitching about funding other peoples things.",
"It's a licence in the UK which you should be paying to watch terrestrial TV and live services such as iPlayer. It's what funds the BBC, however there is many debates going on around whether the fee should be abolished in favour of a subscription model for the BBC, which it should. If you do not watch TV, and only stream Netflix and such, you do not need a TV licence. Many of the younger generation these days do not bother getting one once they move out their parents. It's around £120 a year \"roughly\"",
"Its basically a tax that pays for the bbc. However you don't need to pay it if you don't watch any live TV, I.e. you only watch Netflix. Of course this is hard to prove. There was a case where someone in Scotland didn't have to pay, and could prove they didn't watch live TV by the fact they couldn't get a signal. That being said, its about £120 a year, and for that you get all the bbc TV channels, all the bbc radio stations, including regional ones. Bbc iPlayer. A their websites with content, many of them educational and probably much more I don't know about. For 120 quid a year, I think its a bargain. Also - no adverts on bbc TV channels - their money comes from the licence fee not advertising."
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ixws9f | Why are most older music videos on YouTube uploaded all around the same time? | I’ve noticed there is a whole host of music videos uploaded in late 2009. These were all music videos released prior to this day. Did the music rights on YouTube change on this day? Why was everything uploaded then and not earlier? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of them are under VEVO so my educated guess would be that VEVO was created around this time, and acquired the rights to upload the videos then. Don't forget that YouTube wasn't the behemoth that is today before the 2010. Right at the 2010-mark was when YouTube exploded. Music videos were still played in music tv-channels like MTV, VH1, and random local channels with the live-chat bar on the bottom. TL;DR: 2009-2010 was probably when music videos made the jump from TV to Internet thanks to VEVO. It was an outstanding move on their part."
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ixwtv5 | How are bots utilized by scalpers able to avoid failsafes most websites have in place today, such as captchas & active fingerprinting? | Given all the news about bots snatching up the PS5 & Xbox preorders that recently went on sale, I think it would be very beneficial for more of us to understand these kinds of things. I’d like to think I have a more technical background than most (code in a few languages, Linux user, etc), and yet I’m still perplexed by how this is done. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some CAPTCHAs are simply out of date and can be solved with pretty good reliability by AI now. The development of tasks to foil AI which a) can be reliably solved by humans and b) new tasks can be *generated* mechanically, is a bit of an arms race with the development of AI itself. CAPTCHAs which can't be solved mechanically, can be outsourced to humans in a lot of ways, often through systems which work roughly the same way as Mechanical Turk. Someone could be just sitting there solving hundreds of CAPTCHAs in a row for a few bucks an hour. Or a hundred such people. One clever approach which some people have used, if they can operate some other high-traffic website like a free porn or piracy site, is they will \"re-gift\" a CAPTCHA from one site to the other. You receive a CAPTCHA from the Ticketmaster site, you take that image and, real quick, re-display it as a CAPTCHA on your own shady site, someone solves it, and then your bot inputs that solution at Ticketmaster. If your shady site gets frequent enough traffic, this can all happen before the original CAPTCHA expires. Other things like active fingerprinting are sometimes approached by using stolen or fake social media accounts. Some botnet operators farm hundreds or thousands of fake social media accounts, making them friends with each other, posting fake comments on each other's fake pictures, so that they aren't easily identified as fake - at least, not by automated means."
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ixxvpe | What is a "Best Boy"? | Whenever I watch a film, every time without fail there will be something called a "Best Boy" in the End Credits. What is it and what does it do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On Reddit, this is any photo of and ostensibly male dog or cat. In film and theater, a Best Boy is equivalent to a Foreman or crew lead. In the electrical department the chief/head electrician is called the \"Gaffer\" and chief of the lighting and rigging department is called the \"Key Grip.\" Sometimes the two departments are combined. The titles Best Boy Gaffer and Best Boy Grip are also used, respectively. The best boy is the most senior worker beneath the department chief. This term may have originated from electricians. The best boy would be the most senior apprentice working under a master electrician. The term Gaffer or \"Godfather\" may occasionally be used outside of film for a master or lead electrician.",
"Best boys are responsible for the day-to-day operation of the lighting or grip department. Their many responsibilities include the hiring, scheduling, and management of crew; the renting, ordering, inventory, and returning of equipment; workplace safety and maintaining discipline within their department; completing timecards and other paperwork; stocking of expendables; loading and unloading production trucks; planning and implementing the lighting or rigging of locations and/or sound stages; coordinating with rigging crews and additional photography units (if applicable); handling relations with the other production departments; overseeing the application of union rules (where relevant); and serving as the day-to-day representative of the department with the unit production manager and coordinator of their department.",
"They're like a foreman of a plant or the XO of a ship. They handle specific day-to-day responsibilities. They are normally highly experienced and have many people under them. They schedule and maintain everything in their domain.",
"Finally one I could answer but I'm too late. I can however tell you WHY he's called the best boy. Early on, lighting and electrical work was very dangerous and could lead to burning down the whole set so when the crew arrived it was common for the director or whoever to say, \"Give me your best boy.\""
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iy141t | Why is their never a "view current password" option whenever you forgot your password? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because passwords are stored using a hash, or at least they're supposed to be if programmed correctly. Hashes are strings of letters and numbers that are produced with an algorithm that processes your password but can't be reversed. Think of a has as the number 10 and your password is a combination of two numbers. There's no way to know if your password is 1+9 or 5+5. When you log in, the password you entered is hashed the same way and compared to the hash that's stored.",
"Even the company who owns the place you’re trying to sign into doesn’t have your password. It’s protected. It cannot be reverse engineered like that. Also, if anyone could just “view” your password, what would be the point of having a password? This also offers a fix if your account gets hacked.",
"I have used websites where when I used the forgot password option they emailed me my password. If this happens to you DELETE THAT ACCOUNT. Plenty of people have already covered the whole 'they don't actually know your password' thing.",
"It is bad form for a website to store your password. In the event that anyone ever looks at the database, they could just get passwords out of it. You could never trust every employee that much. So instead, what is good practice is to use a Hash Function. This is a one-way function. You can easily hash a password and get the same value from it, but you can't take that value and turn it back into the password. They store the hashed value in the database, and when you enter your password to compare, they put whatever you enter in the password field through the same function and just compare the hashed values."
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iy1ys6 | what is DDoS | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Distributed Denial of Service Attack. Basically, you use a shit load of computers you have control of to bombard a server with traffic to the point it doesn’t have the resources to deal with legitimate traffic. The equivalent of hiring 100 people to yell at the person trying to listen to one other person."
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"url"
] |
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