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iy6j0r | Why does phone with 18w charger not use all 18w while charging? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on how the battery is constructed. With some investment you can build batteries that can be charged very fast without problems. But as most people don't use a full battery charge in a day and then connect their phone to the charger over night that is usually wasted money. (The maximum current is for example limited by the reactive surface inside the battery. You can increase that by making a comb like structure inside, or by simply connecting more smaller batteries)"
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iy7h83 | Why is it necessary to leave the door of the oven open when using the grill ? | I never understood this, surely the oven is designed for high temps so why the need to leave the door open? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You only leave it a little open (~5cm - the door will stay in position) , this is to stop the oven from reaching temp and cycling off the element. This means you get a continuous hot heat on whatever you're grilling. If you're fan-grilling then you keep the door shut.",
"... you don't? I know some people do this when finishing an item with the broiler, like crisping up a cheese topping, to be able to better control the heat and not overcook it, but that's the only legit reason to open the door I'm aware of.",
"My oven is on gas and if i don't keep the door open for some time,the flame will extinguish itself bcs is old ,after a while bcs of heat it can keep his flame, that's a reason why some oven needs to have the lid open.",
"I'm not 100% sure but I think the oven is usually electric (with fan assist) and so it doesn't need airflow, or if it is gas powered then there is some ventilation bringing fresh oxygen in to the flame to keep the gas lit But with a grill the gas is at the top (cooks from the top down) and with it being a large flame surface (the entire top of the grill is flame) it doesn't have ventilation to it without the door being open? Might not even be a safety thing, might just be to do with the style of cooking - that you want to keep the penetrating temperature low and just crisp up the outsides more? Like flame cooking"
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iy8bsz | Why some streaming services restrict which content you can access by country? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I’m pretty certain this just falls down to licensing. Perhaps the content is licensed to one provider n one country, and so other providers can’t stream that content in that country, but may be able to stream it in others."
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iyby0y | How does an actual strip of celluloid film get digitized to be released on, for example, Netflix? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1) Place frame between light and photosensor. 2) Turn on light. 3) Record data from photo sensor. 4) Repeat steps 1-3 until you run out of frames."
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iyd5m9 | how do those phone chargers with magnets work without damaging the phone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Magnets don't wreck electronics like you may have been lead to believe. Older electronics had some components sensitive to magnets, like their magnetic tape data storage, and magnets made wonky things happen to the monitor, but modern electronics (and phones especially) are fairly indifferent to magnets.",
"Magnets are only dangerous to devices that use magnetic media, hard drive, floppy drive, crt display. Your phone does not use any of these, it's perfectly safe. The only thing the magnet will affect is the phone's compass.",
"Usually chargers with magnets have magnets that are really weak, like fridge magnet weak. In order for a magnet to harm a computer, it has to be stronger than that.",
"As others have said phones are not to sensitive to magnets in the way that cathode ray tube TVs or tapes were. For the second part of the question I didn't see any answers explaining inductive charging. Basically an electrical current traveling through wire will create a magnetic field, just as a magnetic field can induce current through nearby circuits. Thier are two loops of wire for this charger to work one is in the pad and one is in the phone. Current is run through the loop in the charging pad which creates a magnetic field which the induces current into the loop within the phone that will charge the battery. Inductive charging is cool but not an efficient use of power as their is always loss."
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iydug3 | why is necessary to keep water running when running disposal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To cool and lubricate the grinder, and to wash off the screen inside. A garbage disposal basically grinds stuff up until it can pass through a sieve so anything that hinders that process will wear the system.",
"Burns up the motor without it. It won't ruin the motor if you do a small burst but overtime using the disposal without water will burn it up. I believe this is mainly because the water add fluidity to the stuff your disposing of making it easier to grind it all up thus making life easier for the motor long term. Im a carpenter not a plumber though so I may be missing something.",
"So the food bits don't just stay mushed against the wall of the disposal and rot. Unless you're into sewer-smelling kitchens that is.",
"Imagine somehow turning off your saliva glands and then trying to eat something. You'd have a terrible time and it would be very difficult. Saliva acts as a lubricant and allows the food to slide down your throat. Water does the same thing in a sink disposal."
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iyeoky | How do the "I had my computer watch x number of hours of ...... and here's the script it wrote" work? | Is it some sort of program that was written? How does it process those words and scenes sensibly and then reproduce them semi coherently? Is this some inside joke that I missed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The majority of the \"I had my computer watch X hours of Y and here's what it wrote\" are parodies written by actual humans. There was a \"I had a computer read Harry Potter and try and generate a new story based on that\" effort a few years ago, which was legitimate, but it inspired a bunch of copycats.",
"As another commenter said, they're mostly parodies written by people. In the cases that are done by computers, the data is usually in word or still photo form. They pass that data to a machine learning algorithm that tries to break down the data in a meaningful way so that it can replicate it. A good example of this is [This Person Does Not Exist]( URL_1 ) where they gave a machine learning algorithm a lot of pictures of faces and the algorithm tries to make new faces based off of the data it was given. There's also [Talk to Transformer]( URL_0 ) (sadly, it looks like the demo is down for the time being) that was trained with a bunch of news articles and Reddit posts/comments in order to get the algorithm to try to replicate real human writing. There's [Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash]( URL_2 ) which was generated by a machine learning algorithm that was given the Harry Potter books as data to replicate. This is the one that got famous and caused people to create parodies of their favorite shows and movies under the guise that they were generated by a machine learning algorithm."
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iyfkqd | Nvidia's RT and Tensor Cores. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[Matrices]( URL_0 ) are a mathematical tool that can be used for a bunch of stuff. They are everywhere in machine learning/AI, and quite common in 3D rendering (most transforms in 3D space can be reprensented using a 4x4 matrix). FP 16 and FP 32 are types of numbers. FP means [floating point]( URL_1 ) which is how decimal numbers are represented (most of the time) by computers. 16 or 32 is the size of these numbers. FP16 is a 16 bit floating point number, and FP32 is a 32 bits floating point number. So a 4x4 FP32 matrix is a matrix made of 16 (4x4) 32 bits floating point numbers. > understand WHY these cores are best at what they specifically do and HOW they do it? Doing ML require doing a **shitton** of matrix math. Tensor cores are basically specialized circuits that do matrix operations. Using dedicated circuits is faster than using general purpose processors^[1] which is why tensor cores make DLSS and other ML based techniques much faster. ************** [1] There are several reasons why this is the case, one is that integrated circuits can do complex operations \"in one go\": they don't have to read, decode execute and store intermediate results and instructions. An other one is that it frees the general purpose circuits to do other stuff.",
"Sometimes you just need one number to say what you mean, e.g you have 3 apples. There's only one dimension of numerical information there. In 3D computer graphics you need 3 dimensions of numerical information. You need numbers for the X, Y, and Z axis. So any point in the 3D space is represented by a set of 3 numbers, like e.g (1,2,3). But whole numbers (integers) like those aren't precise (accurate) enough so you need to use floating point numbers (numbers with decimal places). And those are much slower to work with than integers. It starts getting complicated when you need to work with groups of points in 3D space. Like e.g a triangle will need 3 groups of 3 number groups. One number group for each corner and 3 corners to describe the triangle. So you end up needing a data structure that represents that. That's where matrices comes in. The simplest data structure is a list (called an array). It might look like (1,2,3). A matrix is a more complex type of data structure. It's basically a table or a list of lists. You could use it to represent a triangle in 3D space. A 3x3 (3 elements of 3 dimensions) matrix might look like : 1,1,1 5,1,4 1,5,4 Imagine those numbers are actually floating points and you need to multiply that matrix by another matrix. It's going to take a lot of work. That's where tensor cores comes in. They're designed to multiply matrices made of floating point numbers and they do it multiple times faster than the 'old-fashioned' CUDA cores. That's all they do. They have a single purpose and so they can be made to operate very quickly. Thinking of triangles in a 3x3 matrix is a simplification. Without getting too complicated you actually need 4x4 matrices. But a matrix is a multi-dimensional data structure and a tensor core multiplies them together very quickly. Thinking of tensor cores multiplying matrices that represent triangles is a simplification too because they don't actually have access to all of the information required for that. That's why they're used to speed up the DLSS process, but that process involves multiplying matrices as well. (Which represent pixels and motion). So, tensor cores are better at multiplying matrices because that's all they were designed to do (that's a bit reductive but it's essentially the reason). And how they multiply matrices *differently and better* than previous methods involves their design not needing to make use of as many operations (like reading from and writing to memory, registers, and caches). Each operation takes time and energy and if some specialised piece of silicon is designed to only work with data given to it in a certain way (in a matrix), and is only expected to do one thing (multiply those matrices), it can be highly optimised for that task. As well as that, the tensor cores are not just multiplying one matrix against another. You can feed in up to 256 groups of 3 4x4 matrices in each clock cycle. Each tensor core is chomping on matrices."
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iyfvzx | Why is the PS5 digital $100 cheaper than the PS5 w/ disc drive? Surely a disc drive doesn't cost $100 to produce, right? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of it is that digital sales mean way more money for Sony. If you buy a physical disk for $60, some of that money has to go to the retailer, some has to go to the company that physically makes the disks. That's less overall money that goes to Sony/the publisher/the developer. With digital games, 100% of it goes to Sony/the publisher/the developer. The only fix here is to make digital games $60 and physical disks $70, and no one would pay that.",
"Because buying the digital version forces you to make all of your purchases from the PS Store. They can make up the money they lose on the console from all the games they sell you.",
"A PS5 doesn't cost $400 to produce either. You have to account for the cost of the disc drive assembly, the need for a separate case design with a drive slot, a separate manufacturing line to assemble it, extra QA teams to test it, licensing costs for a blu-ray drive, plus profit margin. On top of that Sony probably purposefully charges more to drive consumers towards the digital model",
"The singular physical piece of hardware almost certainly doesn't cost $100. However, basically every video console, especially the first gen of a new model, is sold at a loss. It's just the reality. High-end gaming hardware costs money. If you're paying $500 for a video game console, odds are it cost the company at least $600 to make. Companies are willing to this for 2 reasons. First off, if you price it too high, it won't sell. Parent's aren't going to drop $1,000 on a game console for their kids, and a thousand bucks can be a huge deal for people. The real key to their model though is software sales. Take a $150 loss on the console, and you'll eventually sale $1,000 worth of software to that customer. In this case, since the disc drive is obviously an extra piece of hardware/feature, you can have the best of both worlds with. Charge way more than that feature costs and take the sales you can get from it, and have the cheaper model for everyone else. TL;DR - Consoles are usually sold as a loss in the name of making that up with game sales in the long run. Since the disc drive represents a clear \"upgrade\" that some people will be willing to pay for, you overcharge to help make-up some of the losses. The people who can't afford that option will still by your cheaper unit. Edit: To add a bit to this. You'll also noticed that as a console ages they'll start to revise it. Over time they figure out how to make it smaller/cheaper. They'll consolidate things on the mother motherboard which makes it cheaper and easier to produce. You'll also see features that turned out to not be big deals get dropped. For example the the later produced PS1's lost the paradelle ports, and bot much smaller. The PS2, PS3, and Xboxes all got smaller and slimmer."
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iynz8y | why are the Pirate Bay and other torrent sites able to still exist? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"International law is complicated and the sites are careful to not break local laws - the users share the data, not the site.",
"Sites like the ThePirateBay are based in countries other than the US so your have to cross international jurisdictions to shut down the site. Not all nations have agreements in place to allow this to happen so depending on where the website is located it may not be possible to shut it down and bring those in charge to justice. In the case of the Pirate Bay it took years to get the founders in a court room and by the time they were found guilty it was already too late. They had sold the site months earlier so they had no control over it anymore and the legal process had to start all over again. So aside from a PR stunt the whole thing proved to be a debacle and giant waste of time, money, and resources. Trying to stop sites like that is also like play a game of whack-a-mole, you kill one and 12 others spring up overnight to take their place. Blocking them out of the DNS or locking out the IP from the ISPs (blocking the site at the border as it were) sets a precedent that allows the US to censor the Internet so that can't happen. Plus getting around that using VPN services is trivial. ISPs also used to throttle BitTorrent traffic to try to slow it out of oblivion but got threatened by big companies like Blizzard who were using BitTorrent protocols for legit reasons like patching World of Warcraft. US media companies still hate sites like that and do what they can to shut them down but have slowly started to realize that it's wasted effort. They are better off trying to address the reasons for piracy in the first place. - Making movies, TV, and music worth the money spent - introducing streaming services that are as or more convenient than using BitTorrent. - or in the case of the music industry, lobby Congress to pass laws that effectively allow you to steal revenue from content creators that use any of your music without any recourse.",
"Most of them operate as search engines essentially. There has been some legal actions, and they keep trying to take them out. But it just doesn't stick.",
"they are careful to not actually host anything. a torrent site is only an index telling users where to find certain files thru the p2p network. They aren't hosting anything themselves, so the law doesn't really have a solid angle to shut them down, and since there is no real setup its much easier to create more of these pages than it is to take them down."
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iyuyby | How exactly do people who upload pirated content (suppose from Netflix) benefit from it? | I'm pretty much amazed at how prevelant piracy is and I'm shocked to see at how lengths people will go to upload pirated content. Almost every show/movie is uploaded on some torrent site as soon as within a week of release. This just made me wonder whether people who upload such content earn anything or have any benefits uploading the content? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some do it simply because they want to share the stuff. There is a whole political movement that disagrees with the copyright altogether. Some do it for fame. Game cracking is basically a race between different competing teams. Some do it for money, some download pages pay a share to uploaders to attract content wich in turn attracts more people who watch the ads before.",
"The initial reason is to benefit the community... The more people uploading content to a site, the more popular it will become, and the more popular it is, the better chance there is of someone else making available the content you don't have access to but want. With the internet, after a certain point it also turns into something of a game - whoever is first gets the internet points for having their name attached to that upload, and the knowledge that they beat everyone else. It just turns into a challenge just like beating everyone at a game.",
"It depends on the pirate. I’ve heard from some that they want a world of entirely free content and want to help get there (illegally), some just want to see if they can do it (more common in PC game piracy), and some just wanna help people who can’t afford the media.",
"Something everyone has missed: not every piece of media is available in every region. Piracy solves that problem. If you really want to watch something and it’s not available in your country legally, you’ve got an incentive to pirate."
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iyyte2 | What makes an USB so versatile? | I know that inside a data USB there are 4 wires but I don't understand how those 4 wires allow it to do su much, from file transfer to 7.1 audio and much more | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electronics is all about using voltage/current and time to generate on/off signals (0s and 1s). How that stream of data is interpreted is completely up to the application that is using it. So you may plug a USB into your computer to transfer a file, it's going to send electrical signals (0s and 1s) to your PC, and Windows is going to say \"Oh hey, I see you're transferring a file to the computer, so I'll interpret these signals in a special way that allows me to copy the data to my hard drive\". When you stream audio over USB, whatever application you use says \"I see we're playing audio, that means the 0s and 1s I'm receiving need to be translated into an audio stream\". The data-in-route over a USB cable looks the same no matter what you're doing, it's the sending/receiving applications that determine *how* to interpret the data."
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iz0fjf | Why did old GPUs not need as big heatsinks? | If you look at pictures of pretty old GPUs you will see that they barely had any cooling onboard. Now the best GPUs all have massive coolers and multiple fans. What made the power consumption go up so much? (Even old CPUs like a Pentium needed a big heatsink, why not the first GPUs as well?) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They didn't need to reject as much heat. Modern microprocessors cram an incredible amount of transistors into a small space, where the path of individual electrons is critical to their function. These structures generate a lot of heat, as they always have. But now more than ever it's critical to reject that heat quickly, as temperature changes will have a disproportionately greater effect on modern ultra-dense microprocessors than they did on much older models.",
"Power consumption Modern high end GPUs consume 200-300W of power and turn it mostly into heat. The RTX 3090 uses 350W (hence the massive heatsink) while even a mid tier card like a GTX 1060 uses 150W Rewind to Nvidia's venerable 9800 cards, even the 9800 GTX+ consumed just 140W letting it get by with a much smaller heatsink. The GT 9600 green edition was at just 60W which was low enough for just a heatsink without a fan To deal with more heat you need more surface area or more airflow, but preferably both. The high power consumption of modern high performance cards requires large heatsink and fan assemblies to keep temperatures at safe levels for the components",
"Because they were far less powerful. As Uncle Ben said \"With great power comes a metric ass butt fuck ton of heat.\" I'm paraphrasing. The faster the clock, the higher the voltage, and the higher the internal capacitance, the higher the power dissipation. Die are also getting physically much larger and contain billions more transistors. Each of which dissipates a little bit of power. And the old heatsinks on processors were NOTHING compared to the triple fan 300mm liquid cooled setups most people are running now-a-days. For the same reason. An i7 or i9 running at 5gHz could boil a cup of water easily."
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iz0qes | How were we able to broadcast video through the air at reasonable quality for years before we were able to stream video at similar quality via internet? | I'm in my 40s so remember dialup and waiting for videos to load. Always baffled me we could receive multiple TV channels through an aerial instantly but a direct wired connection had to buffer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Broadcast video is a single signal that goes to everyone. The internet involves individual communication from one computer to another. An analogy is that broadcasting is like giving a speech to a room with 100 people in it, while the internet is like having 100 simultaneous different conversations."
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iz16i1 | What can someone do with your IP address? How does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The most common and easiest thing they can get is information about your physical location (city, state, ZIP code), which they can use in some cases to get even more information about you, especially if you're not careful about protecting yourself on social media websites. Besides that, they theoretically could access your computer remotely, but there are a lot of roadblocks there, such as your ISP's internet security configuration and firewalls, your own modem and router's security configuration and your computer itself (usually has some sort of basic firewall online by default). A dedicated and capable enough hacker might be able to find a way in but it's not going to be a super simple or easy task.",
"ELI5. Your IP address is like your physical home's address.... Except, instead of being an address for a house, connected to a road.... It is the address for your computer, connected on a massive world-wide network. If you gave somebody your home address, they could potentially show up to your house, and perform malicious tasks, or even call a \"swat attack\" on you. ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )) Its actually a thing...... Likewise, with your computer's address, they can potentially do malicious tasks. However, generally speaking, your router has a \"10 foot steel security fence\" up to protect against certain types of intrusions. This fence, is referred to as a firewall. Typically, your computer will also have its own \"fence\" up as well. But- using the proper piece of software, you can look at the holes in the fence (port-scanning), and potentially gain access to internal services. Also- lastly- your IP Address can be tied back to your home's physical address.",
"They can point a port scanner at your machine, check to see what ports it answers on, and then probe those ports for a service that they can use to either take control of your machine or obtain resources from it."
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izag6x | A current cellular company's commercial is claiming they have 'the fastest 5G in the world'. Isn't that like saying my car travels 55mph faster than anyone else's car does? How does the cellular network speed measurement system work? | Edit: Wow, thanks for the information everyone! It seems like this question uncovered a lot of industry trickery. So what questions should I be asking the next time I buy a cell phone and they try to sell me on their shiny 5G, and what are acceptable answers? I live in upstate NY, outside of any major cities, if that makes any difference. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"5g is a type of connection, not necessarily a speed. So saying \"we have the fastest 5g\" like saying \"I have the fastest *sports car*.\" Not all 5g speeds will be the same. I believe some company was testing its 5g and it was slower than current cellular connections. Others may be faster. It all depends on your device, the tower, traffic on that network, etc. But the network itself is 5g because that's the type of network. The same way different sports cars can go at different speeds, and you can drive a sports car at 20mph or at 120mph. So the \"5g\" part is equivalent to the \"sports car\" part, and doesn't tell you anything about how fast it's going.",
"5 G simply means \"Fifth Generation\" of cellular communications standards. A cellphone company has to provide an antenna that uses this technology and your phone has to be within range of it AND have the technology in it to connect to the antenna. Once your 5g phone is hooked up to the 5g antenna, the antenna needs to connect to the internet. (a lot like how your router hooks up to your modem which hooks up to the internet.) So, even though you might have a super fast connection to the antenna, if the antenna's connection to the internet is slow, your connection speeds will also be slow. Other things to consider: 5g has much shorter range, and your speed drops off as a function of distance from the antenna. Each antenna will have a limited bandwidth, so if too many people are using the same one, you'll get slower speeds. 5G is a standard that allows for different hardward to connect, you can still create shitty hardware that connects to 5g, just really slowly. There are also going to be software speed limiters put in so that you don't suck up too much bandwidth, because most cell phone providers suck like that (at least in the US)."
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izazoq | Why is Nvidia buying ARM? Why is ARM so important, and why aren't other companies interested? | Like the title, I've heard a lot about Nvidia's purchase of ARM. Why is ARM so important and what does it do? Why aren't other, larger companies trying to buy ARM? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ARM licenses the intellectual property for a line of small, low power microprocessor cores. They are used in most cell phones and tablets today. They are also starting to be used in server farms, because heat is a big deal in that application and their processing power/watt is good. A lot of companies wouldn't want ARM because they are incredibly expensive. Some companies wouldn't want it because if they owned ARM then other ARM users would bail and look for other solutions, making it much less valuable. Nvidia has great processors for graphics and artificial intelligence, but no general purpose processor. Until now. They can't really get into the x86 market, but unless you want to play in the PC space that isn't necessary. Having ARM gives them a full IP set for a lot of applications that are going to be big. They will also not only get the licensing revenue from other people using ARM, but they can also fuck over potential competitors.",
"ARM is one of the major manufacturers for mobile CPUs (most proper CPUs that dont fit an x86 socket will likely be designed by either them or IBM) Nvidia has a vested interest in their tech because its a potential stepping stone into improving on their own tech, Nvidia has been pursuing ***\"system on a chip\"*** designs for a long time but in order to do that cleanly they need their own CPU architecture as they dont want to have to license to either Intel nor AMD(not like they would anyway due to how the x86/64 license agreement works) ., they want this because if they can produce this system they effectively can market it as a system that can be used for anything that requires processing power no matter how small(this matter when ti involves ai Development and server farms). Hence Nvidia is buying out an alternate way of achieving their goal and prevent their competitors from doing the same, as they would now own the licenses for ARM's Tech IP.",
"ARM is primarily known for making processors ideally suited for mobile devices. Most cellphones and tablets use ARM processors. The mobile market is only increasing in size and value, and the recent announcement of Apple switching to ARM processors for their laptops just makes the company that much more valuable. Nvidia makes a number of chips but are most well known for graphics processors, owning ARM aligns their company to make the full stack (CPUs + video). So why isn't a giant company like Intel buying ARM? Well it's complicated. In the US there are anti-trust laws to consider, essentially monopolies are illegal and a major player like Intel buying ARM could be seen as a monopoly requiring the US government to step in and break them up.",
"Every computer needs a CPU, which ARM licenses to companies including nvidia. Intel and AMD design and manufacturer the most well known CPU architecture, X86. Because of this any system that nvidia produces ends up paying a significant portion of the margin to CPU licenses. Over 10 years ago nvidia started designing a x86 compatible CPU known as Project Denver. As part of settling litigation between nvidia and Intel Intel agreed to pay nvidia $1.5B and nvidia agreed to not produce x86 CPUs. Nvidia then licensed the ARM architecture and produced the first 64 ARM SOC (CPU and GPU combined). Nvidia has continued to produce SOCs with ARM licensed CPUs but wants to capture all the revenue from their SOCs sales, as well as capture license revenue from their GPU designs, which are much better suited to AI and machine learning workloads than ARM's Mali GPUs."
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izctnj | How do puzzle designers create puzzles without making them impossible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Very, very carefully. It’s much easier to design a puzzle as someone with experience, than it would be to solve a puzzle you are unfamiliar with, at least depending on how you want to look at it. Sure, there’s a LOT of time that would go into something like that, but it’s often easier to go into something with a general idea of what you want to accomplish, then to look at something completed and try to guess what it does. That being said, I don’t really know much about complex puzzles making. I could be totally wrong, but even simple puzzles have easy ways of making them much more difficult. If you look up Chris Ramsay on YouTube, he’s got tons of examples of difficult puzzles. Even regular jigsaw puzzles are a lot easier than they could be when you consider everything is basically color coded. If everything were all the same color, it gets way harder."
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ize7tj | How does Netflix's Night on Earth shoot in lowlight color, and why do some of the scenes seem so computer generated? | Are these just hyper-sensitive cameras, or is there a lot of post-processing. Also, why do some of the scenes (particularly first episode cheetahs) feature such fluid, unnatural motion? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I haven't seen the show but I looked it up because I'm somewhat of a video nerd and now I'm interested. Here's an article I found on it. They don't go into too much details about what cameras or lenses but it's pretty detailed. [ARS link]( URL_0 )"
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izjx28 | why do we have to install a specific Android OS for a specific phone when we can install Windows or Linux on any machine(x86) and expect it to work without too much problems? | Like, If want to install a custom rom(LineageOS) for my Galaxy s9, I have to use a build specifically built for the s9. But when I go to install Windows10 or a Linux distro on my laptop, I can use one version of to install on any x86 machine. Why do we need to make specific versions of android operating systems per android phone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In comparison to phones, computers are very standardized in terms of their software architecture. Computers also enjoy an advantage in that an OS manufacturer (like Microsoft) can include a whole host of drivers to work with any combination of hardware, even if you don't use them all. Phones don't have that advantage. Consumers want their phones to be fast, lightweight, and streamlined- and the hardware on them is fixed. That means trimming all the excess fat off an OS so it fits exactly to a specific phone and its hardware, not to mention adding carrier-specific tweaks and features as selling points. The trade off is that by doing that you lose a lot of compatability as each manufacturer's flavor of Android ventures farther and farther from the original software. It's an interesting example of real world evolution. Phone software too far removed from the original OS isn't compatible with it, while animal species with common ancestors too far removed from each other can't interbreed.",
"Windows comes preloaded with a lot of drivers to run the more common hardware configurations. If you have anything in your machine that isn't one of those standard configurations you need to install a specific driver to use it. A phone OS they don't want to add drivers for all the possible hardware into the installer for size reasons plus most people don't install custom oses onto their phones.",
"Drivers. The short answer is that every phone has a specific set of hardware and peripherals - digitizer, modem, screen, audio, fingerprint reader, camera, storage, memory etc etc. These drivers need to be included, configured, optimized and tuned. The abstraction between the hardware and Android is a combination of a BSP (board support package) as well as vendor specific drivers. These are all tightly configured and highly optimized to work together so that you get a responsive experience on your handset. Additionally, some of these drivers may be proprietary and require some significant IP licensing fees (I'm looking at your Qualcomm!) Add all of this, and the fact that new flagships and models are being released yearly, and there is no time for the community to reverse and implement their own BSP / drivers for handsets.",
"This is due to how ARM works. This is actually the core of why security and support cycles for Android phones are so crappy compared to x86 OSes like Windows and Linux. ARM CPUs are a lot simpler compared to x86 CPUs. This simplicity removes some of the layers between the hardware and software. What this means is that, for ARM OSes, the OS kernel has to be tailor made to work with the hardware in the phone (Specifically the drivers). The kernel of Android is different between different phones. This means that for a new version of Android, the CPU manufacturer (Most likely Qualcomm), Google, and the device manufacturer (Samsung for you) have to work together to update the Android kernel for the device. Note that custom ROMs still depend on these updates from Qualcomm/Google/Samsung in order to work. They all depend on the Android kernel that they create. This is why the custom ROMs are tied to a specific device. This also means that once Qualcomm/Google/Samsung drop support for the device, you will no longer receive Android version updates nor security patches for security issues related to the kernel. The ROM is only a skin on a proprietary Android kernel.",
"Each part of any computer needs instructions on how an OS should interact with it. This requires code in the form of \"drivers\". Phones are small, expected to be fast, and consume very little battery power. Workstations are plugged into the wall, have lots of storage, and our expectations of performance varies, along with the variety of swappable parts. Thus, Linux and Windows are \"fatter\" to accommodate the variety of hardware, while phone operating systems are \"thinner\" and attuned to a subset of devices. While some Android support is dropped for older devices, it's not because the new version would no longer work, but because they no longer want to test and accommodate that older hardware with the latest version of the OS. There are some exceptions, but many of the device restrictions are voluntary...not because it can't be done. You'll see a lot of people \"porting\" different operating systems onto \"rooted\" devices...meaning they unlocked the device in such a way that it enables them to install a version of an OS that shouldn't be supported. Sometimes it works great. Other times, they have to obtain/write a particular driver to make the older hardware work."
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izl7a5 | How does Memtest survive RAM errors? | My computer has been crashing a lot, and I suspect hardware, so I'm running Memtest86+ right now to see if it's RAM. But since RAM is the swap space that a computer uses for running programs, where does Memtest 'live'? How does it test the memory when it has to use that same memory to store the test results? If there's an error with the memory module that causes a crash, why wouldn't Memtest crash? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Even when RAM is having issues, there are usually some good sectors that can be used to reliably run a program. The application itself is quite small, so you don't need a lot of good, useable space to run it. From there, it'll be able to test read/write capability of other sectors to determine if they are bad or not.",
"Memtest *can* crash. Such a crash happening is implicitly to be considered a (suspected) major memory fault and the test re-ran. Consistently crashing memtest hints to some pretty catastrophic RAM instability.",
"RAM issues are localized to certain addresses and physical cells, it generally doesn't impact the whole stick. If data is loaded into the good sectors then it will read/write correctly, and if its loaded into a bad sector you won't get the same value out that you put in originally. Memtest is pretty small so it will run mostly out of the CPU cache, but the small amount that is in RAM has pretty good odds of landing in a functional address. You're usually using memtest to check your RAM when a few kB of a 4 GB stick are giving garbage readings, if a few MB are mucked up then pretty much nothing will run. If such a high percentage of your RAM is mucked up that Memtest can't even run without crashing then that's a pretty definitive set of test results that'll get you a free RAM replacement from most manufacturers"
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iztdv0 | In programming, what are Compliers, Interpreters, Assemblers, and Linkers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Computer codes are written in \"people\" language. If I'm writing a code in Python and I want it to display \"Hello World,\" I write print('Hello World') That means something to me and it means something to you, but it doesn't mean a thing to a computer. Compilers are programs that take your code and \"translate\" it into something that your computer understands. Some languages have to go through a compiler before you can run them. An interpreted language (like Python) comes with a file that tells your computer how to handle its commands. So unlike a compiled language, you can script an interpreted language directly in a command prompt if you want to. Assemblers are very low-level code compilers. They correspond much more directly to the computer's machine code. Linkers are programs that combine multiple files from assemblers and compilers, and put them together into a single file like a .exe",
"Compilers : Translate human readable (and usually written by human) instructions (source code) into machine runnable instructions. The same source code can usually be compiled for several type of CPU (this is why a Unity game written once can be compiled for Windows PC, Android phone, Xbox, all which use different CPU) Interpreters : Immediately translate and run the human readable instructions without having to translate the whole files or saving them first. If you press F12 on your desktop browser, you can usually see the Javascript used by the current page. Assemblers : Translate assembly instructions (instructions that closely resemble the actual machine instructions, except written in letters instead of binaries) into machine instructions. A single line of instructions written for compilers or interpreters might translate into multiple lines of assembly instructions. Assembly instructions don't work across CPU type, but can utilize more features and squeeze more performance/memory. Linkers : The output of a compiler can be several files, linkers combine them into a single file ready to be run/used by the OS. The purpose of separating them is so only changed source code need to be recompiled (into object file), while object file from the rest (library, file that doesn't change yet) can be reused."
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iztk8z | Why are films shot in 24 FPS/ 23.97 fps, but video games are in 60 Frames-Per Second. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Films were originally shot at 24 frames per second because it was a good balance of cost and fluidity. 24 still looks fine to the human eye, but it is a lot cheaper, especially in the days where every frame was precious storage space. Even today, with special effects and CGI, 24 frames per second is cheaper, as it requires less renders. Because of the origins of film, much of the equipment in theaters (like projectors) are not made to handle 60 frames per second. So basically, a movie would have to end up making two versions anyway, a 60 fps version, and an edited one with about 60% of the frames removed. And most places would only be able to display the 24fps one anyway. Video games are built in order to render quickly and responsively. Not only is a high rate important for the player's reaction time, but a lot of physics engines will use the same concept for collisions. Games require the engine to check on the objects all the time, so that it feels natural when the world is changing rapidly and in response to the player's actions."
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izzy9f | Why do most devices get fixed more than half the times by simply switching it off and on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sometimes all a device needs is to have all of it's RAM reset to 0. This is easiest to get from just restarting, since that *usually* clears the on-board memory and gives it a fresh start from a cleared state. It's the equivalent of giving your computer a nap - it rests just long enough to clear it's \"head\" and start over. ;; Just sometimes programs get a bit confused, and if you give them a \"clean slate\" to start up from, they behave as they should. The alternate state of the memory is that there are already values stored in it - that weren't appropriately cleared out by previous programs using that memory. Imagine it kind of like you're trying to move in to a new apartment or house, except it already has furniture in it. You need room for your own furniture, so you have to go through the extra step of moving that old furniture out to make room for your own. The programs are doing the same thing; except with data instead of furniture. And with how complex programs are, they might be running checks on whether or not the data is a certain value *before* it clears it out. And then they're trying to move furniture into an already furnished room, which causes issues.",
"Many reasons let’s say there is to much RAM usage turning it off clears the RAM and makes it fresh to use again. Maybe the code or algorithm just had a glitch and restarting the program can make it run again."
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j00uiu | If in the near future Sony decided to stop providing the Playstation Network service for PS3 and PS4, what would happen to the digital video games that we have purchased? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gone. Reduced to atoms. But seriously that’s the downside of digital games. If they are gone they are gone forever. You don’t own the game you just kind of lease it forever.",
"You don't purchase them, you license the copyright. It's different than when your purchase a disk or cartridge that contains a copyright license while physically owning the medium. So ya, when they stop supporting it, you can't reaccess it. It's in all that fine print no one reads. There's a lot of strings behind digital games.",
"As far as I know this has already happens with the PSP and being able to download games, so it would work the same way. It's digital media, they're not legally required to still host the games/movies/etc. If they choose to move on to the next service/console and so on. The best thing to do would be to download all the games prior to that happening. Fortunately I doubt that will be anytime soon they remove access for the PS4 especially."
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j02o7h | how do robot amputee parts connect and listen to the brain? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have electrodes connected to the muscles in the stump. They sense the tiniest movements, and are programmed to move the hand in response to specific movements.",
"Usually they connect to muscles into the arm or hand and when your arm muscles move it moves the fingers",
"Your hand has many tiny muscles. They move when you try to move your fingers. Roboarm uses this. But this is 100× more complicated than this",
"They use the electrical impulses coming from the brain in the muscle tissue to control the movement. It is almost impossible to detect the smallest ones, so most of the time, they use the big muscle close by (like the biceps if the forearm is missing) to control a claw like prosthetic that closes when you contract. For more complex ones with individual finger control, it's case by case, but a few that I've seen use a morse-like code to control each finger (2 long contraction is the index, 1 short 1 long the thumb, ...). As you can guess, it's incredibly unnatural and requires lots of training by the person, and in the end, slower and less finely tuned than a real hand. It looks fancier, but in the end, most people compromise and use the more practical one, that still allows them to grab things but not individual finger control."
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j0382o | Why do loading screens always stop at 99% | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To simply the complexities involved behind the scenes. Imagine a roadtrip between point A and B in a car where the kid in the back keeps asking \"Are we there yet?\". The best answer any driver could possibly do is base their answer of an estimation such as \"We have traveled 40km out of 200km\" or phrase it as going 20% of the distance. Now I choose this metaphor since there can occur just as many interruptions when travelling in traffic, such as accidents or unexpected traffic jams. Or that the distance itself might not be the thing that can take the most time. If 90% of your distance is done on the German Autobahn at 200+ km/h speeds, but the last 10% is done on tiny off-road animal trails in the mountains, then the kid in the back wondering why \"we aren't there yet\" won't really understand since they had travelled 90% of the way two hours ago.",
"Sometimes to give the appearance of steady progress the bar is set to increase at regular intervals. Leading the bar to be done before the program. However it's possible the final task, which is usually some sort of compiling task for all the data it processed, it takes a lot more time so 99% of the tasks are done but the last one takes a bit.",
"It's sometimes a trick that developers does to allow the machine to process something. The loading progress is calculated from the amount of data copied over the total data to copy (from hard drive to ram for exemple). But once all the data are copied, the machine must process all that, which takes time but we can't know how long it'll take. So developers cap the loading at 99% so that easier for users to understand that \"it's not ready yet\"",
"If I told you to eat a bowl of fruit as fast as you can, while giving me updates on how close you are to finishing it - you wouldn’t be able to do it very well. If there are 4 pieces of fruit in the bowl, you might tell me that you have completed 50% of the work after eating 2 of the 4 fruit. But, some fruit might take you longer to eat than other fruit. If that’s true, then eating half the fruit can’t mean you’ve completed half your task. Maybe you have a good idea of how long it takes to eat an apple; but not all apples are the same, so your estimate is going to be a little off every time. Maybe the banana isn’t ripe. Maybe the orange was a bit harder to peel today. Maybe you weren’t expecting seeds in your grapes. Also, you’re just trying to concentrate on eating! It’s a bit rude of me to expect you to eat this fruit as quickly as possible, while also wasting your energy working out how fast you’re doing it at the same time. You’ve decided you’re not an expert at calculating the time to eat fruit, and you never wanted to be. Instead, you’re just going to say: “I’m 99% done, I just have to finish eating this last apple”.",
"Reviewing what has been downloaded and checking that it is all there and in the right place takes extra time."
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j0a29a | Why can app games use false advertising to show an entirely different kind of gameplay than actually offered? (Personally, I'd rather play the falsely advertised game every time.) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The mobile gaming market is sort of a wild west at the moment. Companies will pop up with some cheap garbage game that steals assets from more popular games, run misleading ads to attract as many gullible users as possible, then fold in a year or two only to form again under a different name and repeat the cycle. Part of the reason why this happens is because of microtransactions and speed. The companies appear and disappear faster than legal action can be taken against them; a straightforward intellectual property suit might take a few years to resolve and by that time they have already gone out of business. Microtransactions mean that their misled customers are likely only out a couple of dollars at most so the authorities don't have much motivation to crack down on them very hard. Ultimately they are doing it because they can get away with it.",
"You probably don't actually want to play the falsely advertized game. I looked up one of them where you move the pins to solve the puzzle. It's a real game, and you can download and play it. The problem is that all of the levels have to be hand-made, and they're not super difficult, so people just blow through them in a minute or two. As a result, the game devs FLOODED the game with ads. Like, you have to watch an ad multiple times per level. It's like, move a pin, watch an ad. Move another pin. People in the reviews talk about the game as being almost aggressively trying to make you stop playing the game in frustration, and they kind of are, because if you just played the content you'd clear the entire game in like 10 minutes. EDIT: If you want to sit through the ads, the game is called Hero Rescue.",
"Btw: [These]( URL_0 ) are the kind of ads I'm referring to.",
"This was explored in a episode of.the Reply All podcast. Here: URL_0",
"Part of it is trying to attract a certain type of people that will easily get obssessed with games and pay money for advancement in it. It seems they've found that people who play puzzle games more commonly have both of these traits and will get hooked into games easily, regardless of what type of game they actually start to play. Thus, they advertise puzzle games regardless of what type of game it really is.",
"Anybody miss paying for an app up front rather than this freemium BS? Also, I've reported them to Google and nothing ever happened. Google is a humongous and profitable company. If they wanted to nip this in the bud, they could. But as long as they get money out of it, it will continue to be a problem.",
"These ads are designed to piss you off. You’ll be like “OMG HOW CAN U BE SO STUPID LIKE LITERALLY THAT PUZZLE WAS SO EASY LEMME DOWNLOAD THIS GAME AND SHOW YOU IMBECILES HOW ITS DONE” Sadly my son falls for this every single time despite my efforts to tell him he’s just being provoked. 🤦🏻♂️",
"In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is where you would go to make a claim of false advertising. Given its mandate and funding, these kinds of ads are way, way, *way* down on its priority list. And even if it were high on the list of Things The FTC Cares About, the first (and possibly only) thing the FTC would do is issue a cease-and-desist order. If the advertiser complies, then it's usually case closed. In other words, nobody cares.",
"What's worse: a potentially legitimate game with horrific advertising. Saw an ad repeatedly show up for me about a year ago. It never showed any gameplay. Only cheap military-style background music while a guy combined military emblems to make higher-ranking emblems and the voice line \"Sir yes sir\" played every single time. That was it. After weeks of seeing this ad over and over again, I couldn't stand to hear anyone say \"sir yes sir\" even once for the rest of my life, and I knew absolutely nothing about what the game was actually about beyond players enjoying emblem arrangements on the rank-up screen. Finally searched it in the app store once. Apparently it's actually some sort of strategy game with good reviews, and it got a sequel that also has good reviews. As far as I can tell, both games were somebody's honest passion project. I wouldn't know. I hated the advertising far too much to try it.",
"you wouldn't be able to sue for false advertising because nothing was sold. You downloaded the game for free, and if you paid for any microtransaction inside it you had time to experience the real game before. If they did that kind of advertising for a paid game, however, then that would be a whole different story.",
"Story telling vs actual game play When they are showing those images its story telling in the advertisement. Whereas the actual game play is different. Commercials have had alot of trial and error. One story years ago was that a car company showed a car driving underwater. So someone bought the car and then sued, when it sunk and couldn't drive. So the fine print of the ad after that said \"Car can't actually drive underwater\"",
"What i don't get is why they don't make those games available since they would be immensely popular.",
"It's extremely hard to get someone to download an app, but if you have enough people download it (for the right or wrong reason, with or without deception), the algorithm will show the app to more people in the App Store, eventually bumping organic downloads.",
"Same reason why scam emails are so \"obvious\", they only wanna attract idiots. Idiots would give them money, baiting a smart person wouldn't. All those scam email typos and bad grammar are not because they are idiots. That is why games are blatantly falsely advertising, to attract suckers that would spend money",
"I can only speak for larger companies but it’s not as nefarious as you think it is. Typically, the advertising team is separate from the product team and work with very different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). The Marketing team’s job is to get the user to click on the ad and hopefully download it: what the players do after that is (usually) inconsequential to them. In the most basic terms, their job is to identify players they think will spend more money than it costs to acquire them, create a campaign that they think they will click through, and market directly to them. The reason you see those ads is because the cohort you belong to is likely to download and monetize in a way that offsets the cost of the marketing spend.",
"Any of you guys seen the Matchington Mansion game? Wow what an offensive game.",
"Mafia City is one game where the ad is completely different from the actual game. It looks to be some gta ripoff where you have to make choices but if you look up the gameplay on youtube, you'll see that it's the same old base-building game. Though the ads are entertaining to watch in my opinion. Level 100 boss gets turned into a Level 1 prisoner.",
"Online advertising has always been false and toxic. Games are just popular remember to slap the monkey and win a free psp",
"Look at the hamburger in any fast food chain ad. Does it resemble the burger that you get handed across the counter. The wonderful world of advertising.",
"Homescapes? Pulling the options to get the sludge out and the water to the man? Oh, yeah, that looks so much fun! I was so disappointed when it wasn’t the game.",
"I can't understand... if they think the game mechanics they falsely represents in ads are more catchy and enjoyable than the actual game, why don't they develop the game in the ads? Why should you make a game you don't even want to show in ads? All this thing is so shady and unintelligible to me.",
"I think a big issue is that once you click the ad for the game the ad goes away so by the time you find out that's not what the game is you can't report the ad. And the ad gets there in the first place because the ads aren't vetted thoroughly enough by the company serving the ads.",
"The falsely advertised puzzle games follow clear \"real world\" logic so people can understand what's happening in them without having to follow a tutorial, whereas the actual game likely requires several minutes to learn how to play. You aren't going to be looking at the ad for several minutes so they try and entice you with something you can understand within the time you spend looking at the ad itself. I'm very curious as to which company does the ads for Homescapes, Hero Wars, Evony, and all the rest. The ads are clearly outsourced to someone else but I have yet to find out who."
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j0dq0i | should UDP be preferred over TCP for increasing bandwidth utilization? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The choice depends on your application. Most traffic is TCP because it makes sure all packets have been received. Like when you read someone the Wifi code, and they'll tell you how much of it they were able to type in so you can read the rest of it to them again. (This will use slightly more bandwidth.) Time-sensitive things, like some online games or a livestream, may be better served with UDP. It's comparable to throwing paper airplanes at your destination.",
"UDP may be more appropriate for real-time uses, where old data is useless and no longer relevant so holding things up to wait for a resent packet or wait for a slow packet would be counterproductive. TCP is more appropriate when you want to make sure you get all the data, (and in the correct order), even if you occasionally have to wait for dropped packets to get resent or things to sort out their order."
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j0gm8l | Why do PCs take so long to start up? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not sure about your computer, but mine can go from cold off to login/desktop in about 20 or 30 seconds. A big factor here is what hard drive you've got - a solid state hard drive is going to boot up a lot faster than a 7200 RPM magnetic hard drive; just in terms of how much faster SSD's are at loading things (not just games, but the OS). I do remember using older computers without SSD's that would take 5-15 minutes to boot up, and that was painfully long. ;; There's a lot of other stuff that happens during startup; like the computer doing things to initialize memory/RAM and send/receive signals to other components installed on the motherboard. But usually the biggest boot-up factor is going to be from loading the OS off the hard drive; a faster hard drive (an SSD) is going to trivialize that by loading so much faster. ;; It also depends on other factors like where/what it's actual boot drive is setup to do. A school I attended years ago used networked boot-drive images. Which is to say the OS was actually \"installed\" on some other computer, and at start-up the work stations would retrieve the OS data over the school's network. That meant a lot of time spent waiting for the computers to boot up because they were all waiting to get data sent to them over an ethernet cable instead of load it directly from their own hard drives."
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j0hx9l | How does Bluetooth work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Each Bluetooth device has a little radio in it. The Bluetooth radios can talk to each other if they are on the same channel. It's kinda like setting the TV to the right channel so you can watch a particular show. TVs stay in the same channel until someone changes the channel. But Bluetooth radios don't stay on one channel. In fact, they jump around about 80 different channels all the time! All that jumping around follows a pattern, and there are many different patterns. The only way two Bluetooth radios can talk to each other is if they both jump between channels at the same time following the same pattern. But if the first Bluetooth radio doesn't know the pattern or timing of the second Bluetooth radio, how do they find each other in the first place? When you want to Bluetooth products to talk to each other, you first have to 'pair' the Bluetooth radios. When the radio is put in pairing mode, it goes to a specific pattern that all Bluetooth radios know. That way, the two radios can find each other. Once they find each other, and after they ask each other some questions to make sure they're talking to the right radio, one radio tells the other radio what pattern it is going to use, and provides the timing. Then they both jump to the pattern and talk to each other as they jump from channel to channel. Usually, each radio stores the codes so they can find each other again next time (a process called bonding). Once they are paired and connected, the two radios can exchange all sorts of data. That data could be music streaming from your phone to your headphones, letters and words from your keyboard to your computer, or movement data your smartwatch to your phone."
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j0j7s5 | Why when you've gotten your password wrong 3 times and you're asked to make a new one, no programs will allow you to use the same password you originally had? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It’s a common security “best practice” to maintain password history and disallow reuse of passwords. The idea being that requiring a different password each time the password is reset makes it less likely that your account can be compromised."
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j0juct | How is it that some really famous illegal streaming sites don’t get shut down or sued? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Damn those sites! Which sites are you talking about though? What are the best illegal streaming sites, specifically? Feel free to DM me.",
"Many of them are based in other countries where the laws about pirating media are different. A lot of the larger corporations have a harder time suing those streaming sites, as international law suits are complicated, and in many cases there's not much that can be done if the country at question goes \"That's not illegal here, so you can't sue them.\"",
"The internet is designed to be inherently free and unrestricted. For the internet to work, everyone has to agree that their computers will pass data another computer asks it to send to another computer. Because the internet works this way, it requires great organization and effort to block a website. In comparison, it is easy to circumvent these blockages, because the internet design is in favor of freedom. It’s like trying to chase a squirrel, it’s just too fast to catch. It can go faster and change direction faster than you. It has a big advantage.",
"They usually do get shutdown. But it's hard to sue if they're based in a different country and if it's hard to figure out who is running the website. The best they can do is hit them with a DMCA notice, but even then it really only applies to America. There are other country equivalents but as you can probably already see, this means a long legal process in each country, especially when a new website just pops up again."
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j0kjgg | What makes a computer go to sleep when you shut the lid? | Like the question says, what makes a computer sleep when you shut the lid? Is it sensing a lack of light somehow which tells it to sleep or something? How does it tell when the lid is shut vs open just a bit? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a sensor in the body of the laptop that senses the lid is closed. Exactly what and how it works depends on the design. One example for Dell and HP is a sensor on the board that detects the metal of the lid, or a tiny magnet buried in the plastic. If you don't like that feature you can turn it off in your Control Panel power settings. When I close the lid on my laptop it just turns the screen off and the laptop keeps running.",
"Depends on the laptop. My cousin once had one where you could see a button above the keyboard, the screen folds down and presses the button in. Of course, we would push it with the screen open and it would put her computer to sleep. I assume most laptops have a physical button or switch or sensor that notices when the cover closes.",
"Depends on the laptop. Older ones had a little switch near the hinge that would get pushed when you close it. Others have sensor built into the hinge itself that sense when it’s open to certain angles.",
"Modern laptops use a magnetic sensor somewhere on the base or the lid with a matching pair of magnets. When they’re brought together the laptop feels it and knows to go to sleep. Some devices and magnets can trick it, like speakers can trick it"
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j0r265 | Why do some phone charging cables are lower quality than others? | What I don't understand is what material makes them charge slower than others Please and thank you | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of the time is is simply thinner electrical conductors. A thinner wire has higher resistance so the voltage will drop over it at higher current. The resistance is also proportional to the cable length so a cable diameter that work fine on a short cable might not work for a long calble. A thinner wire is cheaper because less copper is needed."
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j0t5pn | How does a torrent file work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A torrent is like a puzzle. It tells you where you can find the pieces, and like a puzzle tells you what it should look like when it's completed. Your computer reaches out to a tracker and says what part of the puzzle you still need. Anyone who already has those pieces will send them to you. Once you have all the pieces your computer checks the file against the picture it has of what the puzzle was supposed to look like.",
"A single torrent consists of multiple files that is concatenated together and split into equal length pieces. The torrent file contains a list of the files, their lengths and for each piece it have a unique hash to make sure it gets the right data from the peers. This means that if someone were to send out the wrong data the client will notice because the hash does not match the one in the torrent file. The torrent file also contains lists of trackers and other metadata that might be useful to the client."
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j0vooz | why there are no photorealistic drawings/paintings from before the last couple of centuries? | Why did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, romans and all the smaller cultures from throughout history not leave behind any good drawings? I know they have their unique art styles but it can’t be that *nobody* attempted it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There ***were*** photorealistic paintings and drawings in ancient times. Have a look at the [Fayyum portraits]( URL_0 ). These date to the first century BC - 2000 years ago and yet look like they could have been painted yesterday. There are more [here]( URL_1 )",
"To get those, people had to study anatomy, perspective, optics and light, and more. The western world didn't start seriously investigating the natural world in these ways until around the Renaissance. Also, most/all art and learning at this time was paid for by really wealthy patrons, and there just wasn't enough people or wealth to support a bunch of painters making their livings off of portraits for nobles until the 1400s. It's worth noting that classical greece got very good at lifelike statues. Maybe their paintings haven't survived, or maybe they just didn't care much about paintings on canvas as a culture.",
"Photorealism takes a *long* time with little/no movement of the subject, change in lighting conditions, etc. Drawing a living, breathing subject photorealistically isn't a reasonable goal. Those drawings/paintings are almost always accomplished by referencing a photograph.",
"Because they didn’t have photos. Pretty much every photorealistic painting is just a photo that has been painstakingly recreated... basically like how when you trace an image on paper it looks way better than if you try to freehand. The fact that the photo is already on the same medium (a 2d piece of paper) instead of real life makes it easier. One method older painters discovered was to use a mirror, translating the image from a 3D plane to a 2d one and therefore making it easier to copy",
"Art is a craft, and as all crafts the techniques needed a long time to develop. For example, eyes. In ancient Egyptian pictures, faces are drawn in side profile, but the eyes are drawn as viewed from the front. It's a good abstraction of a human head, a 3D object with a myriad of details. Somewhere in ancient Greece art we can see the development of a new technique: draw an eye in side profile as a triangle with one curved side! The Egyptian artists were not less skilled than the Greece ones, and both produced luxury items. The combined knowledge of humanity just expanded over time. Another factor is time. Paint until very recently was made from organic compounds and rots. It also tends to be applied very thin and it doesn't take a lot of rot to destroy the picture. We simply have a lot less paintings preserved. Do check out Pompeiis murals though. They're some of the best preserved Roman paintings and there's some amazing art there."
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j0z4zh | Why does rendering a 4k video take longer than filming a 4k video? | So I made a video today using 4k footage I filmed on my phone. I then edited it in Adobe Rush, on my phone. Why can't my phone use the same processing power it uses to turn the data it's getting from my camera to make the footage, to just render the video? 1m of 4k footage takes 1 minute to make... 1m of 4k video takes 15 minutes to render? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because capture and rendering are handled by two separate parts of your phone. Typically capture is handled by a dedicated cmos sensor, while rendering is handled by your central processor, which also does a lot of other stuff and is not optimized for video",
"Filming dumps the video stream to storage, usually with minimal compression, and sometimes with no compression. Compression is fast and takes little CPU when you are doing light compression. This means the CPU is working only moderately to shrink the size of the resulting file to save some space. On raw video even this can yield a file that's quite a bit smaller than the uncompressed stream, but with 4K this will still be quite big. When you encode the video for some purpose, like to email or upload, you usually want the resulting file to be as small as possible, which takes a lot of CPU. You probably also want it to be as high quality as possible within that small file size, which seriously increases the CPU work necessary to compress it. With Handbrake, a video conversion software, I can set the compression pretty light with moderate quality, and have it save a movie faster than its running time. Or I can crank up the compression, crank up the quality to max, and it will take over a day. Now on to encoding hardware. Encoding can be done through the CPU or through special hardware that makes it dramatically faster. On a phone that has such hardware it can dump that video stream onto the storage with rather little CPU involvement. Then you move it to your computer and try to compress it with a general-purpose CPU, which is slower for this task, in addition to asking for better compression and quality. You can buy graphics cards that can make your computer do it much faster."
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j0zk1x | Why do devices need to restart after software updates and is it the same for big servers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Some of the code is loaded in memory and in use, you cant overwrite the code while in memory, that would crash and cause writes on different areas and maybe damaging user’s data. Imagine you put your pants backward, you need to take out both legs prior being able to switch back. In other cases you can just turn off some features, and then not restarting. let’s compare those cases with a shirt, you can take out both arms then rotate the shirt and then get arms into the sleeves. Why is that in most of the cases the OS require restart? Cuz Os provides services to apps and other services itself, so the easiest way is to do it before everything is set up, before any relationship is established either with software or to other services. Then you have an installer that would place the new code on place, before the system boots up. In this case, you wouldn’t be able to replace a motor belt while in use. And while you could technically replace battery while in use, the risk of damaging something is so high that you better stop, replace, and start over. From the “perspective” of other car parts, nothing changed"
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j12xex | How is it possible to remove a spleen using keyhole surgery, presumably without an incision large enough for the spleen to pass through whole? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because you suck the spleen through the tube. You dont care if you remove the spleen intact or not so you just suck it up all mushed through the tube.",
"Is it weird that I don't necessarily want that image out of my head? It's kind of dope. Good for you doctors",
"It’s called morcellation. I place the organ in a bag and cut it into chunks within the body and then pull the small chunks out. The bag helps prevent spillage into the body. This typically is not done for cancer cases, with concern for spillage and spread."
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j150zv | Could the internet in the entire world just shut off all at once, like in that episode of South Park? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In a word, no. The internet is composed of [multiple independently owned networks]( URL_0 ). It would take a cosmic event to shut *all* of them down at once.",
"Very nearly impossible. The internet's original design, with 'distributed control', came from military research. One of the basic design goals was that in the event of a nuclear war, parts of the network could keep working and reroute traffic through surviving nodes even when their neighbors were destroyed, and there is no 'central node' whose failure can kill the whole network. (Look up ARPANet.) To disable the whole network, you'd probably need something like the mother of all solar storms to knock out computers planetwide. Or an amazingly widespread set of attacks knocking out thousands of nodes."
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j155x0 | How do walkthrough store security things work? | You know the things, the barrier things you walk through going in and out of the store. How the heck do they work??? I understand them picking up on electronic security tags but what about most items that just have barcodes? This has confused me since childhood and I'd love an answer. Do they even work on barcoded items? Are they specifically for security tagged items and nothing else? Please help a gal out | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's all based around magnets. The product being protected has to be tagged. Sometimes it's really obvious, like the plastic dangly thing on a nice sweater. Sometimes it's a little more hidden, like a little strip hidden between the plastic of a case behind the CD. They are magnetized to a certain strength. If the clerk doesn't \"demagnetize\" it (remove the tag or wipe the case across a *different* magnetic field that's hidden in the cashier's desk) then when you walk through those detectors through the door... it'll detect 'em and go off."
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j15vx7 | Where does the bulk of the power we use come from? If not Coal, Solar, or Nuclear, then where do we get most of our power? | I've heard that Coal/Steam power is more uncommon nowadays, and Solar/Nuclear power has not yet become the norm. If not from these two sides of the spectrum, then where do we get the bulk of our power from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here's a great map of the United States to get an idea of what powers each region: URL_0",
"It depends on where you live and is gradually shifting every year from coal/natural gas to some form of renewable. According to URL_0 , in the United States 63% of electricity was generated by fossil fuels. About 38% from Natural gas About 24% from coal And the rest from other sources like petroleum. These numbers will change from country to country and state to state. But it seems like on average more electricity comes from natural gas that from coal",
"It depends on where “we” live. It might be nuclear, it might be hydro, it might be coal, it might be natural gas...",
"Coal being more uncommon is relative. Around the world it's still the most used energy source. We want to change that, but that causes pretty serious problems. Not only do we need to replace it with renewable power, but we also have to find a way to stabilize the energy grid, because now that job is done solely by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, and we aren't sure how the others could support the grid alone (we have concepts but they are only tried on a much smaller scale)"
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j16sb0 | What is RTX? How does it change the lighting in a game? Please be as detailed as possible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Imagine an oil painting of a dark room containing only an armchair, and beside it, a lamp. Everything in the picture is just paint, so the lamp is painted bright white to make it look like light, and the chair is painted with dark paint for the shadowed parts, and lighter paint for the lighted parts. This makes it *look* like the lamp is shining on the chair, of course it's all just paint. Now if the painter wants to add a cat to the arm of the chair, she will then have to repaint much of the picture to correct for how the cat is affecting the light. This is how video games worked the old way. With the ray tracing in RTX, they no longer fake the light and dark with paint. Instead, imagine they build a shadow box of the same scene, with an actual little 3D chair and lamp. Everything in the box is painted normal, neutral colors - no fake light made with paint. Then they put an LED light in the lamp. The LED light shines on the chair and makes the lighted and shadowed places. And if they add a cat on the arm of the chair, the light and shadow will change as the light interacts with the cat, changing the scene; nothing has to be repainted.",
"Its mainly Ray tracing, as in it simulates ray of light striking the object, forming shadows and etc. This allows lighting to not just be a brightness setting, but also part of the environment. The classic animation is literally sprite, and/or model skins, this means every light interaction is fixed to a certain ratio, such as shadows and what not., RTX allows dynamic lighting which makes the light interaction seem more fluid and life like."
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j170db | How does my TV remote work even though it's pointed the opposite way (not towards the TV)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Your remote operates via a directional infrared signal. The infrared light combined with a sensitive receiver can allow the infrared light to bounce off of the walls and objects behind you and still hit the television. If there are mirrors or paintings with glass on the wall it will help dramatically.",
"Your remote may not use infrared. It may be blue tooth of radio frequency. My father years ago when he had one of those giant satellite dishes could change channels from outside the house. It used RF as the control box also relayed the signal to the dish to move to to pan to the next satellite. (FYI you can tell if an IR remote is working or has dead batteries by pointing it at the camera on your phone, you phone will reveal the infrared that is invisible to the eye)",
"You TV remove emit Infred light, and Light have wave like properties, meaning it bounce off objects. a simple test will be have the tv behind you, and window infront with clear view. Point the remote out the window and you will find the tv unresponsive, because there is nothing to bounce the light back to the tv."
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j17586 | Why do we say that humans see 24 images per second (movies) but games bag about 60 FPS? How can we even see a difference? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Simply because \"humans see only 24 frames per second\" is patently bullshit. The human eye can process information fast enough that it can even get a benefit from 240Hz monitors. The 24FPS thing is a historical remnant of times when technology wasn't quite good enough to do better, and it yields acceptable results even today for films. But try it with a computer game after playing on 100+ fps and you'll get dizzy from how choppy the game is.",
"24fps is just a traditional standard for film. It gives a particular look and feel. TV runs at 25 or 29.97fps so is already different. Try looking at some drone footage on YouTube that runs at 50-60fps l. It all looks different because you can already tell the difference.",
"As in, we can ONLY process a limited amount of images per second (the speed it takes for the cells in your eyes to receive and sent the info to your brain). HOWEVER, we can see high fps, we will perceive the extra frames as motion, higher fps = smoother animation. 60FPS was bragged because for a long ass time, 60FPS was the limitation of the monitor. Comparing 60fps to 30 and you'll notice a increase in smoothness, and if you only play on 60, you'll actually notice the choppiness of 30 despite it being seemingly smooth. We can actually \"see\" up beyond 200 fps, the image just feels smoother and smoother, until it feels like \"live\", as we approach the extreme FPS value, the graphic will feel more and more real worldish provided the texture keeps up."
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j18cgh | What is HTTP/3, and how different will it be from HTTP/2? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In practical terms? Things get faster. You get up to the counter at the local burger join. If it's a 1.0 place this happens: * You: Can I get a burger, fries, and a milkshake? * Them: Whoa, slow down there, I only do one thing at once. * Y: Can I have a burger * T: Here you go, your burger * Y: Can I have fries * T: Here you go, your fries ... Version 1.1 makes this a little better in that you can ask for things all at once, but you're only getting them in the order you asked, so if the burger takes 4m to cook you've got to wait before getting any fries. Version 2 further improves things. If this is a `2` store then the clerk can get multiple things at once and give them back in the order that they're ready. They can even give you half your fries now, and then the burger, then the other half of the fries. Unfortunately it uses the same service counter to hand things across, so one spill and the rest are held up. Pretend the clerk spills your milkshake but then instead of handing you the fries and burger has to remake the milkshake first. Version 3 fixes the 1-counter problem. If they spill the milkshake you still get the burger and fries right away. If you hear mention of the QUIC protocol, that's what it's doing. Switching that back to a browser, it means you might get to see a whole webpage minus one image, instead of a network blip during the sending of that image slowing everything else down. ----- The second advantage of this change is that Version 3 makes it quicker get to the ordering of food. In a 2 restaurant the clerk is a bit chatty. They always start with \"welcome to burger joint, what can I help you with today?\" and you have to say \"well... I'd really like to order some food?\" before they get around to serving you. In 3-land they say \"welcome, what can I get for you?\"",
"HTTP/3 is a new version of HTTP. It bulids on HTTP/2 and use a lot of the same protocol. However instead of using TCP as the underlying protocol HTTP/3 use UDP and then use a protocol called QUIC on top to do the rate limiting and retransmissions that TCP does. This allows it to be even faster then HTTP/2."
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j18n4x | With regards to video games, what is the advantage of running a resolution mode over performance mode? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You’re pretty much right, there is no direct connection between the resolution of a game and how good it looks. You can run the original Crysis at 8k if you want, it probably won’t look as good as a modern game running at 1080p. All the resolution does is describe how many pixels make up the image, the actual quality of that image can be very different."
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j18slf | Why is it that 4G plans have a data limit, yet WiFi is usually unlimited? Especially when the speed can be so similar? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because the cell towers can only handle so much data traffic, depending on the number of users in the area which is why they need to throttle people's speed sometimes. Home internet is routed through cable or fiber optics, and can handle much larger amounts of traffic.",
"Wi-Fi is merely a wireless extension of an existing land based internet connection. That land based connection such as Cable, DSL, etc may or may not have a data limit and generally won't pass that onto it's wifi users. A notable exception here is on airplanes, hotels Etc. 3G, 4G, 5G, LTE, HSPA, etc these are technically wireless but they are considered cellular connections that come from nearby towers that look kind of like light poles with electronics boxes on top. Sometimes you'll see them on ridge lines and in cities they will be strategically placed for maximum coverage. They have a much bigger range than Wi-Fi. Cellular is an internet connection with your wireless carrier. It's how you can surf the internet and make calls. Wi-Fi is a wireless extension of someones land carrier internet connection. Two different sources, they are just received by your phone wirelessly.",
"Note all the people supposing that cell towers can only handle so much: in Europe we get 13-20€ plans that provide between 80-100 GB of 4G+ speed (after which it's still free but they'll cut you down to Edge speeds) - [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) In addition (I have the 20€ plan) when I travel to a foreign country that's not in the EU, like Canada/US/Switzerland: they provide me with free 25 GB of data (beyond that I'd get charged by the MB). I think the real issue you guys have (much worse in Canada, by the way) is that there isn't enough competition and so they set whatever prices they like since they know you can't really jump ship."
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j19zaa | How do computers keep track of time, even when they're plugged off, and disconnected from the internet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many computers will have a small button-cell battery mounted somewhere that provides a small amount electricity solely for maintaining a clock",
"Basically they have an internal clock that is on the CMOS (small memory chip) of the motherboard that is really low power and runs off of a battery. These days that time is updated when a pc connects to the internet and it remembers it when it is shut off. If that battery runs out the date and time will be reset and either manually input. Or more than likely updates when the pc connects to the internet again.",
"It doesn’t take much electricity to keep time(think about how watches that not only have to keep time but also display it running for years off a button battery). Computers have a small battery backup to keep time. If you leave a computer in a closet for 10 years, the battery might wear out enough to loose time, but those that connect to the internet will check and correct when turned back on."
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j1aikn | What source code does and why it is so bad if it gets leaked? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Source code is the text of the program that is written by a human (usually) and human readable. It's not necessary bad (a lot of software is open source, so anyone can read and download the source code) but for large proprietary projects it can be seen as a copyright violation, and also it makes it easier for the hackers to find vulnerabilities in the software.",
"Source code is the uncompiled code for apps/websites etc. It's exactly what the programmer types in to make the app do whatever it's supposed to do. Leaking it is bad because it allows others to copy the app or find security vulnerabilities very easily.",
"The source code is the recipe. The program you bought is the cake. The hoity toity chef doesn't want you to see the recipes mostly because they don't want you making your own super cakes. And perhaps the recipe may disgust you, or you may discover it has illegal ingredients or whatever.",
"Source code is the code that was written to make the programs that your machine can run. Getting your source code leaked is bad since somebody can essentially copy your code. Additionally, if you have access to the source code of, for example, the source code of a server operating system then you can look through the source code and try to find flaws in the programming to exploit for malicious purposes.",
"Source code is the human readable code that is written and then later run through a compiler process to generate machine readable code that is executed later. A few risks can occur with unintentionally released source code. Firstly, it may contain intellectual property that you don't want others knowing about (ie your code is your own work, you don't want your competitor knowing how you implemented a features. Even more importantly, having the entire world being able to read your code means that anyone sufficiently motivated can analyze your code and point out flaws that might make it possible to do nasty stuff. (Like for example, if there was a flaw that lets an attacker run arbitrary code of their choice on the machine running your code)."
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j1d2aq | How are nano-circuits actually connected to any kind of meaningful logic? | I understand how transistors work, and how logic gates create the actual (at least basic) processor logic, and I understand the basic idea of creating incredibly small transistors. But I can't seem to find anything online that explains how those billions of a few nanometer wide transistors are connected to create those logic gates, given their incredibly small size and the way they're crammed onto a board. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Transistors are connected in the same way that they're created. Manufacturers use a technique known as \"photolithography\", which is basically developing a photograph of the desired circuit layout, except instead of the photograph being developed onto a piece of photographic paper, it's developed onto a tiny silicon wafer. The result is that the entire microchip is created all at the same time, including all the billions of transistors, and all of the connections between them.",
"Everything is done with lithography, doping, and deposition They expose an acid resistive sheet to light, anywhere that light touches becomes acid sensitive (or vice versa), they then clear away the exposed areas. To make the transistors themselves they expose the right areas and hit then with a boron gas(p-type doping), phosphorus gas(n-type doping), or oxygen if they're making the gate oxide. To connect these doped areas together, they expose certain sections to acid for a while so it digs a trench, and then they expose it to copper which settles down in these trenches and forms a tiny network of wires in the chip Stuff in a modern IC is too small to mechanically manipulate, but lithography lets us make very complicated structures without needing to physically touch anything"
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j1d94z | Why did old dial up internet make that screeching sound while connecting? | [dial up screeching sound]( URL_0 ) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dial-up connections send/receive data as sounds over the phone line. The \"screeching sound\" you're referring to is the handshake, where both modems were negotiating how to communicate with each other. That part was purposefully configured so that the user could hear it, so that you could troubleshoot common problems, like a busy signal, or a wrong number. Once the connection was established, the sound stopped being played through speakers for you to hear, but they kept being played over the phone line between the two modems, because that's how data was transferred. [This blog post]( URL_0 ) has a great dissection of the parts of a dial-up handshake.",
"That's the handshake sound. The other modem listens for that sound to start the connection process",
"Dial up uses the telephone line to send data, so if you pick up the phone, you can hear all these signals as sounds. That iconic sound is mostly the \"I'm connecting to the provider's server to get access to the Internet\" startup sequence.",
"Ah, the handshake... It can be described in 3 phases. The first phase is the network interaction phase. Are you a modem? I'm a modem! Here is a list of features I support that we can use. Ok, let's use these features... This phase sounds like a bunch of tones. The second phase is probing and ranging. This is a series of tests for how much of the audio channel is actually available and amplitude. They negotiate how loud the modems should transmit. During all three phases, the modems are transmitting at 300 bits per second. This phase is going to mostly determine the upper bitrate that is possible. The third phase is equalizer and echo cancelation test. This is the part that sounds like a bunch of noise, because it is. It trains the devices on how the channel sounds and how to cancel out noise. Final bitrate and other features are decided after this stage. Playing the handshake over a speaker is for human diagnostics. Ostensibly, an engineer could *hear* and diagnose problems during the handshake. Maybe? Maybe in the earlier days of modem communication? I dunno, I was never that good, or perhaps some of this was before my time. Home users of phone modems had the option of turning OFF the handshake audio, for convenience."
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j1esqd | What made old radio sound the way it did? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There were of course several reasons why old radio technology degraded the sound. But maybe the most important reason was that the old AM radio bands are limited to 3kHz bandwidth. So high frequency sounds in music can not be transferred over AM radio. This makes the music sound \"tinny\". But of course there were lots of other sources of distortion and noise that made the signal sound worse."
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j1f3np | why do companies take so long to push out 'dark mode' updates to their websites or apps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Same reason it can take a while to make a web site in the first place. They want it to look good, and it has to go through testing. You gotta make sure there's no obviously place where text is forced to be printed in black, and perhaps most importantly the company logo has to look good against a dark background and not be excessively bright when it was probably originally created for a light background. I'm sure there's some colour blindness expert who has to sign off on the design lest they get angry emails from users. If you've used automatic dark mode extensions in your browser you know that sometimes there are problems. A company isn't going to release their own dark mode layout unless they're willing to put their name on it.",
"I'm a web developer that works for a large company. We are constantly adding features to better serve our over one million customers. I would love to put in a dark mode for users but if it doesn't bring in dollars or improve the web traffic it's a low priority. The best way to get a dark mode or any other feature on a site is to message the company and ask/complain. We get enough suggestions for the same feature it will happen.",
"Coz it seems like a simple color change, but in reality it could be creating tons of cases where the text is invisible against the background. You gotta check everything first."
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j1k5vj | How can something so small ( considering the effect ) like a nuclear bomb make so much damage ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because there is a lot and i mean a lot of energy stored in the bonds between particles inside an atom",
"It goes back to the age old Einstein equation E=MC^2. What that means is that energy is proportional to mass. C is a physics constant which is 300,000,000 m/s known as the speed of light. What this means is that you can take a lot of energy and convert it into a little bit of mass or take a little bit of mass and get A LOT of energy from it. Subatomic particles, like neutrons and protons, can combine to make atoms. Hydrogen is the lightest element made of a single proton and electron. Combining two hydrogen (also includes deuterium and tritium) atoms together produces helium. This process is known as nuclear fusion because it fuses two atoms together to produce a new element. The helium atom is actually very slightly less mass than the total mass of the previous hydrogen atoms. This loss in mass is caused by creating energy which holds the helium atom together, called nuclear binding energy. Now we can take a look at Uranium and Plutonium which are elements used in nuclear bombs and roughly 200 times more massive than helium. That means there is a lot of binding energy holding these larger atoms together. Uranium 235 is used in nuclear bombs because its fissile and unstable. That means when a neutron is combined into U235 it becomes U236 then fissions into two lighter elements. This process releases the binding energy and some neutrons. Those produced neutrons then hit more U235 causing a chain reaction. This sudden release of massive amounts of energy is what we call an explosion. TL;DR nuclear bombs convert a little bit of unstable mass into A LOT of energy.",
"The energy released is described by the classic formula E = mc(2). The \"c\" stands for the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second. It's an *enormously* big number to multiply something by."
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j1kdmz | So if only thing that can cut through diamonds is a diamond saw. How was the first diamond saw made if there was no diamond saw to saw through a diamond to make the first diamond saw? | Wow that was a lot of "diamond saws" in one sentence... | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Diamonds are very difficult to cut but can be easily pulverized. You can crush a diamond with a hammer without trying that hard. Diamond saws are just saws with a fine grit of diamond dust on the edge to grind through material.",
"You can cut diamonds with steel but your tools wear quickly and it's much slower. Typically the way it was done before lasers or other diamond abrading tools was to locate a weakness in the diamond and cut along it."
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j1kez0 | How do companies collect data on their users and what happens to this data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Companies (not just tech companies) collect data on everything you do. Anything they can possibly collect, they collect. Who you are, what you do, and every possible detail about you. The more, the better. What do they do with that information? For the most part companies use that information to make their advertising and marketing more efficient. Or that data is sold to other companies who will use it in that way. Making sure that advertising gets to the people who can use it, and not wasted on people who don't. A baby food company wants to know who has babies, and who doesn't, so that they don't waste 5 million dollars getting their products in front of people who aren't in a position to buy their products. That's wasted money. It could have been better spent by putting it in front of people with babies. But you can only do that if you know who has babies. You see what I'm saying? The modern world runs primarily on advertising and marketing. EVERYTHING is advertising. And making sure that your advertising is getting the most bang for its buck is job #1, but in order to do that you need information on everyone. As much information as possible."
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j1klr7 | if water doesn't conduct electricity then how does it break electronics, in detail? And why are they called "shorts"? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Water is often full of impurities (salts, minerals) that make it better at conducting electricity. Distilled water should be fine on electronics, but the stuff from your tap is a problem.",
"It's called a short because it literally shortens the circuit. Electricity has to follow a circuit (go in a loop), usually with several components, especially ones early on to control the flow of energy. A short circuit is something that connects the circuit along a shorter route, often skipping the parts that regulate the flow of energy. Water can cause it by directly carrying the current (water isn't a great conductor but it can conduct) or by causing corrosion of contacts.",
"Water isn't called a universal solvent for nothing. Water will dissolve just about anything. The water you drink, even if it's been distilled or Reverse Osmosis (RO water), still contains a whole lot of dissolved ions in it. It's these substances in suspension that make water conductive. Even if you had Ultra Pure water (used heavily in the semiconductor industry as an industrial solvent), which is literally NOTHING but H2O molecules, at that point, it would dissolve your circuit board faster than regular tap water normally would, and short the circuit with conductive molecules out of that. In a sense, the circuit board ends up shorting itself. They're called a short circuit because electricity is a differential trying to seek equality, like how water flows down hill in order to seek its own level. A circuit path that offers lower resistance and impedance will end up carrying the majority of the current. It's a shortcut. It's the shorter path. Just like water flowing through a delta, the majority of the water will take the path of least resistance to the ocean.",
"Every material conducts electricity. Both water and air does conduct electricity but with much higher resistance then most metals. For example copper have a resistance of about 0.00000001 Ω⋅m while sea water have a resistance of about 0.2 Ω⋅m, fresh water about 20 Ω⋅m depending on how much trace amounts of salt in it and air have a resistance of about 10000000000 Ω⋅m. The reason why water and air does conduct electricity is because there is always some free ions that is able to move around. These ions will work similarly to the electrons and holes of a metal and will conduct a charge from positive to negative in the same way. Water have a lot more ions then air and will therefore conduct electricity better, adding salt to the water increases the numbers of ions even further. When people design electronic devices it is common to allow for some exposed metals to be separated by air. Even though there is technically some current passing through the air this is very little because the resistance is so high. So it does not make a huge change in the circuit. However if the air gets replaced by water then the resistance drops by up to ten orders of magnitude. It is still very high compared to metal but it might still carry enough current to be significant in the circuit and change its behavior. A short circuit is an unintended path for the current to take that lets it bypass the load. Generally you have a power supply that feeds power to something that use it. The amount of power that goes through the circuit is limited by the load that is using the power. However if you were to add something conductive between the power line and the ground then you can make the current pass through this instead of going through the load. This can create local heating, it can draw more current from the power supply then it is designed for and it can overheat or it can pull the voltage too low for what the load is designed for and it can misbehave. And when we are talking heat it is usually enough heat to cause damage, set fire to something, melt away metal, cover the circuit in conductive sot that causes more short circuits, etc."
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j1pbk0 | why do some remote controls that use AA or AAA batteries have a little ribbon in them that gets in the way? What is this for? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's to help remove the batteries because they're so tight. You thread it under the batteries so you can pull the ribbon to pop them out.",
"You put the batteries on top of the ribbon. Then when you change the batteries you pull the ribbon and they magically pop out.",
"If you lay the ribbon flat you can put the batteries in the controller then you'll see that there is a little bit of it still sticking up, a tab if you will. If you have to change the batteries before the controller breaks or is lost, then you can pull the tab and the batteries come out easier.",
"Hell four people have already answered this but it looks like we aren't caring about that. You put the ribbon under the batteries and then when it is time to replace the batteries pulling the ribbon makes it easier to remove the batteries. Neglect the ribbon at your peril."
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j1raio | How is a mirror made and what is it made of? | I don’t get it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The reflective part of a mirror is an extremely thin layer of a shiny metal, usually either silver or aluminum. Because the layer is so thin it needs to attached to something stronger so it doesn't get scratched or rubbed away when the mirror is handled. Glass is used because it's transparent, and it's easy to make a very flat piece of glass which prevents the image in the mirror from being distorted. Most mirrors are made by taking a sheet of glass and applying a series of chemical treatments which cause a thin layer of metal to grow on one side. The metal then gets an opaque coating such as paint on the other side so the super thin metal coating is protected from damage on both sides."
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j1svwc | how does a server work and what’s it purpose? | You know the big things corporations have that people in movies and game hack into to? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A server is essentially just a big, fast computer, and its purpose is to serve. To serve what, you might ask; and the answer is, whatever the corporation wants it to serve. It could be an email server, or a web server, or a database server, or anything, really. Anything that a client would need to connect to and request data from.",
"A server is just a type of computer. Any computer can act as a server even the one you are likely reading this on. All you need is a server application to run on the computer to make it act as a server. Because running stuff on desktop PCs, tablets or Iphones is not always the best way of doing things, computer makers make specialized hardware products to run Server software on. Confusingly the hardware, the software that runs on them are both referred to as Servers. (this doesn't make things easier). Really all that is needed for a computer to be a server is for one computer to act as client and a computer to take up the server role in an exchange. A computer can even do both roles at the same time and can be client and server simultaneously. The web-browser you are liekely reading this on is an example of a piece of client software: a web-browser or web-client. The computer that sends out the reddit website to you is a web-server. You home PC could act as a web-server if you wanted to, but it wouldn't do a terrible good job of it. There are all sorts of things that involve servers. email-servers that send and receive emails, file servers, that you store files on, print-servers to allow many different people to access different printers in a company... All sorts of applications that people use in a typical business work on the client server model where a client to access the information is on the desktops and a server is running somewhere in a server-room (or the cloud which is just someone else's server room). These server applications run on specialized computers. These computer often have a form factor 19 inches across so they can be stacked easier in a rack, they have redundant component like two power-supplies in case one breaks and often much more power than your home PC. They may runs special server operating system like a Sever version of Windows. Server applications will be installed on them to go along with the client software on the people's PCs. Usually something called virtualization will be involved. Hollywood movies about Hackers are not usually very accurate. In part because reality is far less exciting and looks very boring. Hollywood like to show Servers as if they were still the sort of giant room filling mainframes that companies used in ages past when in reality they will be a stack of pizza boxes in a shelf somewhere with some very uninteresting LEDs glowing in a dark room and nothing really indicating that anything extraordinary is happening. Hacking also usually doesn't involve any exiting typing or passwords that are 'cracked' by slowly revealing the letter one by one. But in real life companies do have hackers break into their system s and steal the data on their servers. It just isn't very exiting."
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j1wpmg | why is hold music usually a much lower quality than having a phone conversation? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[Relevant Tom Scott video]( URL_0 ). In short, phone calls are compressed to allow sending more data and/or multiple calls on the same wire. This compression is optimized for human speech, but not for music. In particular, it commonly discards frequencies that are outside of human speech frequency range, but are still in music frequency range."
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j1xzdp | Why does resetting a router make it magically faster? | What causes it to slow down and seem buggy? And what happens when you reset or turn everything off and back on to make it work better? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Software crashes and bugs occur in any reasonably complex program. While good programming will allow you to minimize disruption to the program, the cumulative effect of those bugs can have an overall negative performance impact. Resetting allows everything to get cleared the software to start fresh, restoring performance to normal.",
"ELI5: Imagine you have a single piece of paper and a pencil. When people tell you things to do, you write them down on the paper so you don’t forget. As you finish things, you erase them, but your eraser isn’t very good and you’re in a hurry (because lots of people are giving you things to do!), so sometimes parts of words are left behind. After a while it’s hard to fit everything on the single piece of paper, so you start writing smaller, or write different parts of a task in different parts of the paper. Restarting the router is like getting a new piece of paper, whatever someone might have told you to do before doesn’t matter, and you have all this empty space to write things down. Other people mentioned, not all routers are like this. Cheaper consumer-grade routers are more likely to have less memory and less care given to their software. Enterprise-grade routers are usually expected to not need to be restarted unless you’re updating the software or upgrading the hardware, but they’re usually more expensive than the routers you get from your internet provider or from Best Buy. As a personal example, my router hasn’t been restarted in over three months, and the same setup at my parents’ house has rebooted four times in the past year.",
"You know how when you stay up super late you get really tired and start not functioning correctly...then you sleep and allow your body to rest and reset and you go through the next day more easily than the previous night? That's kinda what happens with computers (and a router is just a small, very specialized, type of computer). Over time software bugs cause weird things to happen. Good software can handle most of them okay but not always, and those instances of not always cause things to build up in the cache, can affect how things are stored in temporary and permanent memory, etc. Restarting the device clears the build-up of issues from these bugs and allows it to run better until those issues inevitably build up again. Well-built devices (as in little to no software issues) can still accumulate issues, as hardware can contain defects and such. If the hardware and software were perfect, this wouldn't happen and you wouldn't need to restart the device to \"make it faster\".",
"I'm specifically talking about internet where you've got a pair of copper wires that enter your home. That's what most people have (in the UK at least!) but there are other internet types. When your modem (which is a part of your router) first tries to connect to the exchange, it tries to arrange to get the fastest speed. Your modem can detect how good your connection to the central 'exchange' is by listening to the 'noise' on the line (literally the same as when you're making a landline call and there's buzzing or crackling on the line) - so the router will try to negotiate with the exchange to 'sync' at the best upload/download speed possible, given how much noise is on the line. Once it's done that, that's how fast your internet is. HOWEVER, the amount of 'noise' on your line will change - when it rains and if that conductive rain touches The very conductive copper wires (like because the insulation was cracked or old and degraded?) Then you'll get more noise. So when you're sending packets they're gonna start getting garbled and the exchange won't understand. But it's all good because the exchange detects these garbled packets and tells your modem to slow down - send packets more slowly allowing each packet to be more clear - to be heard over the 'noise'. Every few minutes or an hour or a day, whatever, the modem tries to up the 'sync' speed again and either it will succeed or the rain is still there and it will fail. If the rain lasts long enough, the modem will just get used to the slower speed and just accept that this is it's connection speed now. BUT WHEN YOU REBOOT THE ROUTER, It starts from the beginning, trying to sync at the highest possible speed which is now faster since the rain has stopped. So the internet is faster after the reboot. Edit: replace 'Tue' with 'the' Edit: replaced the below Terms with a simpler explanation."
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j201km | Why do some online payment processors require the CVV code and others don't? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Two main reasons. You can process a payment without a CVV but there's a higher degree of fraud. Bigger companies may accept that risk because it's still a small percentage of their overall payments. Smaller companies like mom and pop stores will suffer badly with a fraud payment so they absolutely need the CVV. Also some nasty websites will store the CVV after the first time you use it, and provide it automatically. However this is a MASSIVE risk and they may get shut down or fined over it. There's an entire audit process called PCI around this.",
"I've never found an online payment system in the UK that doesn't require your CVV, and honestly I'd find it pretty shady if they didn't. Then I noticed when working at an airport, that a lot of our American customers weren't used to signing for card payments or us actually checking the signature, so maybe the requirements on processing payments are just less stringent. We also had to insist on chip and pin over swipe and sign if their card was able to go through via chip and pin (Although we still took contact less payments which seems to sort of eliminate the point of both chip and pin and swipe and sign.) Edit: More accurate to say 'non European' than American, similar issues with customers from China, India etc.",
"The card processing companies charge different rates based on how they got the card info. The more information provided with the transaction the lower the rate. For instance, you can process a payment based only off the number. But the processing companies will charge a higher percentage because of the risk of using someone else’s card. Providing the full information found all over the card(front back) significantly reduces the risk that the card is being used fraudulently. So the processors will charge a lower rate. These rates are not all that different, but 0.1% makes a big difference across thousands of transactions.",
"Online credit card processing can be done in many different ways according to many different options. Strictly speaking, to bill a card, all you need is the number. All the other information is optional. Credit card processing companies are in charge of collecting credit card processing fees, authenticating the card, and billing the credit card company. Whenever a company wants to take credit cards, they negotiate and sign a contract with one of these companies. If the account holder follows more security protocols to process cards, they get a discount. So most places ask for CVV to save money. So a contract can be drawn up to not require CVV codes. But there may also be technological reasons preventing adopting new security protocols. For example, a lot of stores don’t use chip readers, because they don’t want to pay to replace their credit card machines. Online, a company might not want to upgrade their computer software to support CVV codes, because it costs money. Above someone asked why a company would not want the most strict security options to reduce risk. An important point is that the fraud risk is not the merchant’s problem. The credit card company loses money if the transaction is fraudulent. The merchant gets paid no matter what. So the processor basically insures every purchase against fraud by including that cost in the processing fee. The question is whether a lower processing fee offsets the cost of increased security measures. When you do the math, sometimes less security saves money."
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j21c7x | Why are headlights on automobiles pointing more upwards and towards other drivers than towards the road? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You need them pointed high enough to illuminate road signs at night. All those road sign paints are \"retroreflective\", they send light back the same direction it came in from, but you need some illumination on them to see them. A properly aimed headlight should be aimed slightly down to illuminate the road for several hundred feet in front of the vehicle, but you need side and up lobes bright enough to illuminate parked cars, other cars, signs, etc. The brightest part shouldn't be aimed at other drivers...that's why high beams look so much brighter, they \\*are\\* aimed way closer to other drivers.",
"They're not? A properly adjusted headlight beam should actually aim slightly away from oncoming drivers. Park with the nose of your car facing toward a wall and you should see this."
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j25qj3 | Why do software updates (such as notable examples iTunes and iOS) now download the entire software every time, rather than just a small patch for the portion updated? | I miss the days of software patches. The program might be 5 gb, but the update patch might be just a fraction of that, and it would apply itself to the installed files. Nowadays it seems more common (or at least increasingly) that the provider just makes you download the entire program in the latest version. So ELI5: why is this done? It seems like a massive waste of bandwidth. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two issues with patches. Either you need a patch from every old version to the current version and every time you release and update to need to regenerate all these patches. Or you just create a patch from the previous version to the next version. If the user is out of date by several versions, then they need to download several patches and apply them all in order. Neither is particularly difficult, it's just one more thing to manage. Bandwidth is fast and cheap now, so it's just easier to make the user download the whole thing again.",
"> It seems like a massive waste of bandwidth. Because bandwidth and size are relatively negligible things these days. If a download is 5 gigs, what does it matter, that'll only take a few minutes to download on most modern broadband that people have. But if you have to write software that does patches in bits and pieces that will increase the installation times, and greatly increase the complexity of the software itself.",
"for iOS and Mac apps, the entire app bundle is cryptographically signed, so that it's easy to verify that the app has not been tampered with. This increases security and protects against malware, but also makes it difficult to release patches every time Apple releases a new version of XCode - even a small delta change - I have to download the entire 6+ GB file to install it"
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j27i50 | Is an 1100 lumen LED bulb on 73% brightness equal to an 800 lumen bulb on 100%? | If not, what would it be and why? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I would say, by definition, if the 1100 lumen bulb is outputting 800 lumens, then it is *set* to ~73.5% **brightness**. Theoretically, if you are setting brightness, you are adjusting the light level, not necessarily the power coming in. Thus, you're not concerned with the linearity."
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j27uyv | What is GitHub? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a place where people can share code. A repository holds the code and GitHub let's people create many repositories.",
"So it is a place for people to share their work and be able to keep control of different versions of their work. The work is usually code. You can also share your work with lots of people and then control what edits people make to it.",
"**GitHub** is a part of Git which was made by Linus Torvalds(creator of Linux kernel). He wanted to create a collaborative platform to share projects. Most programs I use today came from GitHub. **Fun fact**: Linus wanted to create both Linux and Git for his personal use, but when he shared it, people liked the idea and started joining. **Why use GitHub**: Because it's open source and free. You can make your own projects like an app, a browser extension, a simple computer tool etc. and make the code publicly available to let others download and suggest you changes. Most tech companies mandate you to link your GitHub profile (which contains your project) with your resume. Also, since its open source and the code can be seen by everyone means that it's safe. Programmers may show off their work and skills by linking their GitHub profiles as boost about their projects openly. **What is a GitHub repository**: Repository is an English word which means storage. Your code(project) goes into a storage where you can store your data(code). But why even bring the concept of repositories? To make money. If you want to keep your project private (hide from public) i.e. your own private storage (private repository) then you need to pay a monthly subscription.",
"Let's start with the term \"Source Control\" or \"Version Control\". When you write a computer program you're constantly making changes to the source code files. Once you save those changes, you can't easily go back in case your new changes broke something. Source Control is a tool that lets you save different versions so if you mess something up, you can go back to an older version. A second very important part of this is more often than not, programmers work in teams. You and Me may work on the same file of source code on the same day. You add features, I fix a bug and add a different feature. Trying to manage that manually is nearly impossible. Modern source control tools can determine what lines changed in two different files and \"merge\" them together so both programmer's efforts are changed. It's not perfect but works well enough that it really helps a team work together better. One of the most popular source control tools is the open-source tool \"git\". GitHub is an online tool that uses \"git\" under the hood and provides a web-based interface to the \"git\" toolset. Now \"Repository\" or \"Repo\". For you to be able to work on the same project I'm working on, we both have to store our source code in a common location. It's not unusual to have many different projects. These projects are known as \"Repositories\" or \"repo\" for short. If you want to work on the same project I'm using, you will \"check out\" or \"clone\" the repo so that you have a local working copy. The server holds the main version. I check it out. We make our edits locally using the text editor or IDE of our choice. You could work in one tool, I could work in the other since the result is just a text file. Then when done with your edits and you're happy to share them back with the team you will check the changes back in with a \"commit\" action followed by a push of all your changed files back to the server. The next time I want to work on the project, I'll pull down all the changes made since I last worked on it and I end up with the latest code. One of the things that makes GitHub special is that many people like to work on open-source projects, even if they are the only one maintaining it. By posting your code to a public repository anyone else can download it and use it. They can always clone the latest version to get the updates to the project. They can also make changes and send them back for you look at and decide if you want to add their changes to your code. Hope this helps."
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j2aaab | What is cloud computing and why is becoming more popular? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cloud computing is simply storing data on a shared server that you don’t physically own. Instead of having a server at your company hold your business files, you pay Microsoft money to do it. On one hand it’s often more cost effective and there’s less risk of destroying data if damage or theft on an office or personal location happens. But there is always a risk of data loss or theft as someone else is holding onto your data for you."
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j2brqi | How does a Software Update improve a Tesla's Acceleration/Top speed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Acceleration, top speed and range are all somewhat determined by the amount of current being drawn from the batteries in the car. This amount is controlled by software and the hardware already on the vehicle. Tesla will, very likely, only allow initial settings that are fairly conservative until they have data that shows that the system can withstand higher current draws without reliability issues and long term damage. Once enough data is collected from enough vehicles, they might allow for less restrictive settings with more confidence that it will not have bad consequences. A software update can do this. In other words, the potential performance would already have been there all along, and it is just that the manufacturer did not want to risk it without sufficient data.",
"Battery temperature is the answer, more you demand from your battery hotter it gets. Tesla set their standards pretty high on 1st run, your battery reaches 70 F, it doesn't generate more power till it drops down to 65 F. Then they watched their cars, 10 million miles at 70F and no Tesla spontaneously combust, software update, push it to 75 F. Another 10 million miles at 75F and no spontaneous combustion, push the limit to throttle to 80F, and so on so forth."
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j2hilc | Why can’t robots tick a box to get through a recaptcha test? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The point there is not clicking the box. It's about how you click the box. A robot will do it perfectly, a perfect straight line, in less than a second, without doubts, without having to correct the mouse movement. You have to click it moving the mouse, so you'll need to think about how you are doing it, losing some time, then move the mouse but your hand will never do a perfect straight line. You'll also probably need to correct the trajectory and move it slower near the end because neither the mouse, the table or your hand are perfect mechanical systems. Edit: [According to this]( URL_1 ) Google knows how you interact with the captcha even after clicking on it. Probably even knows how you interacted with past captchas?. The algorithm seems like a secret, but probably based on IA. They can even know if the mobile device has detected a tactile response so they know it's not a bot with touchscreens. Edit 2: [Here you can found another response with an interesting vid]( URL_0 )",
"The not a robot check is usually served to the more reliable people. Reliability is based on items such as IP address (a unique identifier for your current internet session), your internet provider, history within similar IP addresses, and more. Once it's shown, this challenge usually relies on user input and data such as mouse pointer movement, or detecting a touch event if on mobile). Suspicious IPs usually encounter the image challenges. Google uses user input to build its AI for detecting stop signs, bikes, etc.. When Google can't reliably identify these yet with 100% accuracy, most bot makers don't stand a chance.",
"It's not the box. Behind the box is an AI that tries to guess if you're a robot. If it thinks you're a robot, you get a normal CAPTCHA (e.g. \"click the traffic lights\"). So it's no use.",
"Most of the times it doesn't really matter if you're a bot or not. It's repeated interactions that are a problem, and in those cases the button turns into a proper captcha",
"Real check is not how you click captcha. Scripts run in the background that fingerprints you and verifies that the browser and the activity is normal. If you have privacy oriented configuration like things to block fingerprinting, recaptcha will annoy you to hell by repeatedly asking to identity objects even after you do it right. Mouse interaction can be faked as you asked as reply to another comment. Also, it'll set cookies once you complete a captcha a the ticking process is just it verifying that this is a normal browser with normal human browsing activity."
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j2imjb | Why isn't there a software that can reverse the blur of an image to get the original? | Title. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Digital images are made up of a bunch of numbers that the computer turns into colors on your monitor. When an image is scrambled, it is making unknown changes to those numbers. If you don't know what changes were made you'll never know what the original image was. For example, if I start with the number 163: 163, flip the digits 361, add 10 371, multiply by 2 742 If I just showed you the final number, 742, and asked what the original number was there no way you'd know it was 163.",
"You can to some degree. E.g. URL_0 You can’t do it perfectly because blurring loses information, which you can’t get back."
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j2in9o | How do they create huge rectangular wooden planks from tree trunks when almost all tree trunks are circular? | I recently got some construction work done at home and noticed that the huge wooden planks used for making doors or other parts, could not be obtained from cutting any tree I have seen in my life from any angle. How do they make them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are patterns of horizontal and vertical cuts along a log which leave you with planks, beams and very little waste overall. The bigger the log the bigger the planks you can cut out of it- and then there's book-matching whereby you put two planks which have been cut vertically side by side ( ll ) flat next to each other ( _ _ )- sometimes if the grain is subtle and matches well enough it can be hard to tell that you have two \"book-matched\" pieces together and not one large flat piece. Also there are definitely trees six feet or more wide.",
"Draw a circle, now draw the biggest square you can inside it. Sometimes it's more complicated, you see charts of a log divvied up like a beef carcass.",
"Do you mean plywood? Usually the boards are 3/8inch to 3/4inch thick and 4ft by 8ft. Google image it if you're unsure. A plywood board is made of a bunch of thin sheets of wood glued together. It's like a stack of paper. Look at the edges of the plywood sheet and you'll see what I mean. They take a big log and turn/spin it in a machine and peel the outside layers of it into the thin sheets. [Like if you held a pencil in each hand and turned it using your teeth to grind it except these blades are calibrated to make very very fine even sheets]. Then they glue the sheets together till the board is between 3/8inch and 3/4inch thick. Then they sand then cut them into the 4ft by 8ft rectangles.",
"Boards are cut the long dimension of the tree trunk in a computerized saw mill . Before boards are cut often bark is stripped off and sold for landscaping projects. The logs are then turned on a type of lathe to make wood veneer for plywood and furniture. The remaining wood is cut into boards . Most of the sawdust is collected and pressed board of different types are made including large particle OSB sheeting for roofs and exterior walls , medium density particle board for floor underlayment and shelving. and fine particle MDF for furniture and mouldings ."
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j2jimj | Why does a phone screen "dim" out when exposed to sunlight but the screens of Game Boys and calculators brighten up when exposed to said sunlight? | Pretty dumb question aside, yes I know very well sunlight is much brighter than a phone screen even in its highest brightness setting, but what exactly is happening in **both** cases? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Screens of calculators have no internal lighting. You can see numbers because external light is reflected from the mirror layer of the screen. Screens of smartphones and computers have internal backlight and no reflective layer.",
"Most phones, game boys and calculators are using liquid crystal displays. They bend and filter light. On a phone, they have big white lamp behind the screen and shine light though. In calculators and game boys, they have a reflecty bit behind the screen that reflects the light. The sun is a lot brighter than the lamp in the phone, so it seems darker. But the sun reflects off the reflecty bit on the game boy/calculator, so it seems really bright."
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j2kt3d | How do fitness trackers know that you actually sleeping but not just laying there resting, being awake ? | Edit: Thanks for all the answers and the awards, I’m shook | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your heart beats slows down when you sleep, they will use a mixture of heart rate and how long you haven't moved to determine how you've slept",
"> How do fitness trackers know that you actually sleeping They don't. They just estimate based on heart rate and movement. It can be pretty far off sometimes.",
"I work in a sleep lab, and honestly they're not as accurate as they make out. They give a good indication but they shouldn't be taken too seriously.",
"I’m not sure they actually do know. “Sleep” is more objectively determined by brain wave activity (it can be measured). Intuitively, I’d guess this is correlated with activity and HR to some degree, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence of this. I’ve switched tracker brands and had substantial differences in steps that are measured, so I’d speculate they’re only loosely accurate in sleep tracking. What’s probably more important is the day-to-day fluctuations.",
"Chronobiologist who studies sleep in a military population here: Most consumer sleep trackers use proprietary algorithms to determine sleep/wake using heart rate variability, activity (typically a piezoelectric accelerometer), user input (sleep marker), and a light sensor. We do not know if their algorithms are similar to what is used in medical/clinical sleep devices. For example Fitbit uses heart rate variability and activity recorded in epochs of 30 seconds. Raw unscored data is unavailable to consumers. For consumer purposes they are accurate enough, but I would advise against putting too much trust in \"sleep stages\", they typically do not hold up against PSG which is the gold standard. Clinically speaking, we do not use them. Our devices cost between $600-2,000, and the software requires training to score sleep (we score by hand after running through our algorithm).",
"They don’t. This is really just a gimmic. [This article in the New York Times]( URL_0 ) looked at this issue and found wild inaccuracies.",
"Also they they don’t. They can guess, but they don’t. I do rn know from heart rate, but just because your heart rate is up does not mean you’re exercising. Similarly, your heart rate being lower doesn’t mean you are asleep. My migraine app on my phone can’t distinguish between “laying on a table because user is not using phone right now” and “user is not using phone and therefore sleeping. They can guess, and ask us, and then use our responses as another piece of data to make better guesses, but they don’t “know”.",
"I need background noise to sleep. My tracker decided that I was awake all night because the tv was on. I slept like a rock. Next night I turned the tv off, slept really badly and my tracker was like, that’s better! Uninstalled, lol.",
"They don't, they just make educated guesses. When you sleep, you heartbeat slows down and your body is more still than when you are awake. Even if you do move around when sleeping, you will be in one set location while when you are awake, you are more likely to be moving around the area. So what they do is see how still you are, how far you have moved and how much your heartbeat has slowed down compared to your regular heartbeat. I quite often spend my evenings in bed just watching movies or YouTube videos. My tracker will estimate that I was sleeping from 8-9pm while in reality, I didn't actually go to sleep until midnight. But that's because I settle in and don't move much which also slows my heartbeat.",
"Mine tracks light/deep/REM sleep. About twice a week I pull all-nighters (insomnia) and my watch says I slept 9+ hours. What a liar.",
"My fitbit often doesn't know the difference. If I lie down and meditate, it will count it as a light sleep. Same with if I wake up but keep lying in bed. It will tell me I'm sleeping while I'm lying there scrolling through the app. I wonder if it's maybe because I have a low resting heart rate it's harder for it to tell? or do they do that for everyone?",
"Short answer: They don't. Shallow answer: They can tell the difference between active vs. inactive, but \"resting awake\" vs. \"asleep\" is gonna be a crap shoot. Generally they'll see a \"low activity\" block of time and then if it's long enough they call it \"sleep\". ELI20: They use a few things to try to guess - mostly motion sensors and heart rate - but they aren't actually very accurate. For very \"normal\" people they work, but not very many people are all that \"normal\". This is especially problematic because the people that are most interested in the data are usually people with disordered sleep - the same people the trackers have the most trouble with. Source: I worked on validating activity prediction algorithms for wrist-worn heart rate sensors for a number of years.",
"Isn't that what the two cameras are for?",
"They don't. Once my Fitbit registered a nap, but I was just being a lazy fuck laying in bed watching shows. I guess I didn't move for a really long time",
"They don't. Garmin, fitbit, apple, if I'm laying in bed at midnight scrolling through reddit threads until 2am, they have all shown me as falling asleep at midnight. Even with me hittin the backlight every 30 mins and look at the screen to see what time it is.",
"They don't. My samsung watch makes false sleep logs all the time when I read a book, meditate, watch a movie, etc.",
"It doesn't *know*, it makes an educated guess. If you somehow managed to lie as still as you do while sleeping for 7 hours, the fitness tracker would very likely assume you were sleeping. And so would a human observer too, probably.",
"When I wake up in the morning and lie in bed scrolling Reddit or talking to people for an hour, my Fitbit has no idea I'm awake. It monitors heartbeat. I honestly think movement is a big component as well as heart rate that others have mentioned",
"They're not 100% accurate. I heard that when monks wear them they only register as sleeping.",
"I don’t think they do. I was reading and it registered as sleep and when I thought I was asleep it said I was awake (I fidget really badly when I am asleep)",
"Some times they dont. I typically sit in bed and watch tv for a bit before i go to bed and my old fitbit always thought that i was asleep during this time so my sleep stats were always a little off",
"Many of them do not, depending on how you sleep. As someone who spends hours laying awake at night, if I am relatively still, it thinks I'm sleeping. For accurate sleep tracking, it requires more than simply heart rate and movement tracking.",
"As people have mentioned, these stats are just a guess. I knew most of these HR+Step+Sleep+Workout monitor watches were gimmicks. And after trying both a high end and medium end watches, Im convinced. Even the simple step counter gives incorrect measurements some days (but it's still good enough to get a rough estimates of how many steps you took overall)."
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j2o8v2 | Do green screens have to be green? Can't they be blue or any other color? What makes the green very usedul and different in video editing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No. It can be any color. Often it's blue. The most important part is that nothing else on the screen has the same color. That is easiest to avoid by using green screens. But you'll just as often see blue really. Essentially you have a computer say \"everything with < color > will be transparent and behind that is something else which can be anything. Cgi or a clip from say inside the star wars spaceships.",
"Green screens use the colour green because modern digital cameras have a lot more green receptors in them. This is similar to the human eye which evolved to see more green (Nature) This is all from memory but I remember watching an interesting documentary on how the technology has developed over time. I think that the colour blue was used in the past, not sure why. I do however know that green is used today due to the way cameras pick up green light, which leads to higher resolution images and a clearer \"green screen\" effect. Sorry for the half assed explanation, it's past my bedtime."
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j2o951 | When two people are talking at the same time, ears can detect the separate voices. Why can't microphones/speakers do the same? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have the most complex device in the known universe in your head, and a large portion of it is tasked with deciphering human speech. A microphone just picks up ambient noise and converts it to an electric signal. There’s really no comparison. Your brain is a biological supercomputer that can dedicate enormous processing power to signal analysis. You can write software to try and pick apart the two voices and isolate the two signals, but doing it in real time requires a lot of processing power.",
"Your ears only detect vibrations, same as a microphone. Your brain is what separates out voices using beamforming, frequency analysis, and natural language recognition. We *can* have an electronic computer do all of those things to an array of microphones. Beamforming is simple trigonometry, frequency analysis is slightly more complex math but nothing a computer can't do, but natural language recognition is still some way off from being perfected - just look at the automatic closed captions on YouTube.",
"Microphones and speakers don't have brains. The ears are picking up everything just the same. Its the brain that does the filtering. And not everyone can do it. One reason I do not like large gatherings is my difficulty filtering out all the voices. It can get overwhelming."
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j2tqku | What Would it Take for Video Games to Get Out of the Uncanny Valley, or Make Realistic Faces? | As the next gen consoles are getting revealed it got me thinking how many generations are we away from playing video games that look mostly indistinguishable from real life. How many years till I can play a game and the face will be able to look like a persons face? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Likely many years, or never if your expectation is to have that sort of experience during gameplay. It takes a TON of time and money to create photorealistic models and animation, and a ton of computing resources to render that at an acceptable framerate. The monetary restriction means, barring some revolutionary AI that automates the work, it simply won't be economical for game studios to dump millions of dollars into facial animations when a mere fraction of that can get above-average results. The computing resources required for photorealistic models and animation, in real-time really doesn't exist today, even with professional rendering equipment and software costing 5-6 figures.",
"A computer can show you a pre-rendered photo-realistic still image. The Uncanny Valley appears when you start to animate; certain things like hair and clothing physics are very (graphics) processor-intensive right now, cause thousands of individual hairs have to be \"computed\" for example, but that can theoretically be solved with \"more graphics power\". However, one big issue is that we communicate a lot with body language and facial expressions, and certain things like an NPC's eyes following *yours* (instead of a blank stare aimed into the space behind you), and an NPC's face possibly having a reaction to *how you feel* are not going to be possible without a lot more monitoring of what YOU are doing (i.e. cameras aimed at your face, so the computer can detect and interpret where you're looking AND your emotions). Right now the game developers can guess that you laughed when an NPC told a joke, so the NPC could \"laugh along with you\", but maybe you didn't find the joke funny, and you find their laughter irritating, and that's exactly what Uncanny Valley is, a mismatch like that."
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j2updk | Now that most movies don't use film, how do they distribute movies to theaters? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Because of security issues, proprietary portable hard drives are now the standard. They are shipped in a portable lock-box (similar to a handgun safe) from the film distributor and plugged into a custom closed digital projection system. It’s like a mini Fort Knox with multi-redundant safeguards against tampering. URL_0 Google to the rescue",
"Movies are digital even ones filmed on film. Digital distribution to theaters is quite simple over cable or satellite. This has reduced costs across the board."
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j2wfxc | How do microphones record static noise? What is that noise? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To clarify are you asking about static noise you hear on recordings? Or from an open microphone in a live setting?"
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ko2hhi | why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ?? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"TLDR: Flash is full of security holes and there are better ways to do what Flash does these days. Flash was invented in 1996 during an earlier era of the internet when browsers were much more limited. Adobe Flash allowed for video playback, interactive components of websites, and flash based animations that were revolutionary at the time. Flash resulted in a renaissance of sorts with flash based video games ( URL_0 ) and flash cartoons (Homestar Runner) becoming popular ways to waste time just as the internet was becoming common place. So why are we killing it? Because Flash is a dinosaur. The flash plugin is full of security holes and despite Adobe's hard work over the past few years to patch it the industry has moved on. Newer technologies like HTML5 have taken it' place and are honestly better at doing what Flash used to do. Continuing to use flash on your website today merely puts your website and your users at risk. Adobe meanwhile is happy to be rid of it because they have been effectively handing it out for free for years now. They made their money selling tools that made flash based websites and games, but that well has long since dried up so to them spending money to patch an obsolete protocol is nothing more than an unnecessary cost. So they have willingly killed off their own product. Basically we don't need it anymore and keeping it around is causing more problems than it's worth.",
"The flash player, years ago, was primarily used to enable rich web content, such as video playback, to be placed into web pages when it couldn't be done using web standards at the time. It also found use for online web browser games. Many of its uses, such as video playback, were later supplemented by modern web standards (such as HTML5 and it's video element). As it has fallen out of common use and is prone to security flaws, adobe has decided its no longer worth maintaining.",
"Other people have covered the what was it aspect, I’ll cover why it’s no longer being used. I worked at Apple when a lot of this was happening. When Apple was developing the iPhone, they wanted to provide the best mobile computing experience they could. At the time, something like 90% of desktop Safari crashes originated in the Flash plugin, and it was a driver for calls to AppleCare, which was costing Apple money. And because it was a buggy mess, it was a primary vector for malware and other noxious code that wanted to gain access to your computer. And it sucked power like nobody’s business, a Flash supporting browser could drain a laptop battery in a few hours; translated to a phone with a much smaller battery you’d need to plug the phone in by noon, which was something that was going to cause a PR shitstorm if the iPhone shipped that way. All this probably wasn’t helped by the fact that there were engineers on the Apple payroll whose job was basically to babysit Adobe and try to clean up their buggy mess. So the decision was made to not support Flash on iOS. It got a lot of criticism at the time, and Android actually tried to use “we support Flash” as a marketing point, but they ran hard into the battery drain issue and it got quietly shunted aside. With mobile refusing/effectively unable to support Flash, and with an increasing percentage of website views coming from mobile platforms, Flash became less viable for websites: they’d be cutting off a lucrative chunk of their potential market since Apple users are more likely to pay for other things too. They could still use it for desktop systems, but they’d need to provide a mobile version too which doubled their workload, so a lot of them just dropped Flash in favor of the new HTML 5 which was adding support for a lot of things Flash had been used for, like video. And that’s how and why Flash died.",
"Flash was a rich media plugin for the early days of the internet when browser technologies and standards were far, far more primitive than they are now. In that era, browsers were generally only good for reading text, following links, and executing extremely simple javascript instructions or server calls. To watch a video, you had to actually download the file and play it back locally on your machine with your local player. Interactive content did exist, but was incredibly obtuse to build and maintain using the HTML and JS of the era, with very limited graphics rendering capability or dynamic content. The principal thing Flash did, other than be one of the first easy-to-use in-browser video stream plugins, was make it easy to build interactive content and animations. Timeline animations and Actionscript were simple to use, easy to pick up by kids, and resulted in a huge boom of content on the internet, at a time where the only content your average person could 'add' to the internet would be a forum post on a BBS. Now you had a raft of games, videos, animations, voicework, just this huge flourishing of amateur content built by people for other people. As internet standards caught up, Flash became obsolete as a way to develop rich media, as it was slow and proprietary. After a point there was nothing Flash could do that you couldn't do yourself with a bit of work in JS, and its ubiquity resulted in it being targetted constantly for attack by hackers. There was an era where the easiest way to compromise a machine was to feed it a fake Flash plugin update and get the user to update, or sneak a malicious flash microapp into an ad delivery network that would auto-load on a user's machine and compromise it. The final nail was when Steve Jobs refused to implement flash support in the iPhone. It was never more than an intermediate stepping stone technology that helped bootstrap browsers into the multimedia delivery apps they are now, and for the time it did it's job well.",
"It’s interesting seeing all these comments on the history of Flash but I haven’t seen any mentions of Macromedia. Flash was developed by a small company and bought by Macromedia, an Adobe competitor who made multimedia authoring tools. Back in those days, multimedia meant CD-ROMs, something like a primitive modern website only static and housed on a CD. Macromedia seemed to see the writing on the wall and crafted Flash into the spiritual successor to their Director tool, which was mostly used for Cd-ROMs. They took Flash from obscurity and into ballooning popularity until Adobe bought them in 2005. Flash had become Macromedia’s crown jewel and for the most part Adobe axed all their other tools after the merger, so the general consensus was Adobe bought Macromedia to control Flash. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Adobe hadn’t bought Flash. In don’t think they were the worst steward of Flash but I always got the impression they let many aspects of it languish. Certainly, most of their other products (looking at you, Photoshop) have not progressed much during those 15 years. Seems to me that Macromedia were Adobe’s chief rival and because they were allowed to merge, we all got many years of Adobe market dominance where they just sat on their laurels and let the profits roll in.",
"To really understand flash, you've got to understand what the internet was like before flash. Up until the late 90s, web pages consisted of formatted text, images, links and external content. That's not to say that web pages couldn't have audio, or video or interactivity or dynamic content or whatever. They could and did. But it was all achieved with external content. That is content that was downloaded by the browser but then handed off to a plugin of some sort to actually process the data and display it to the user. Setting up a browser in the late 90s was a mission. You'd start with both IE and Netscape. You'd need both because scripting worked differently on each browser and thus an interactive webpage built for one browser wouldn't work on the other browser without being ported - something many web page builders never got around to doing. Speaking of scripting, you would probably want to install a couple of extra scripting engines because web page builders could use any scripting language they liked, but neither browser supported all the common scripting language out of the box. Then, you'd want to install a runtime environment (such as JRE) to handle applets. Applets were perhaps **the** way to handle graphics heavy interactive components in your webpage before flash. Then you'd want at least four different media plugins - quicktime, real, windows media and something to handle MPEG formats. Because each plugin only played its own formats and of course, web page builders each had their own preferences.. Then, you'd want to get a bunch of codecs for each of your plugins. Because not only could web builders choose any container they liked for audio/video, they could encode the contained media with whatever codec they chose. Chances are that every new webpage you went to would have the audio / video in a container/codec combination you'd never encountered before so it would take half an hour of messing around to get the page to display correctly. There were other common plugins you'd need to, like the acrobat reader plugin (pdf was just starting to hit the mainstream), shockwave plugin (released in 1995) and so on. And after all that, every third website wouldn't work because it required some exotic plugin or codec or whatever. Trying to view interactive web content in the late 90s S U C K E D. Then, along came flash. It had actually been around for a few years already, but suddenly around 2000/2001 all the web pages were flash pages. No longer did you need to install multiple browsers and for each, several plugins and dozens of codecs. You just installed one browser and one plugin (flash) and boom! your computer could display every website, everywhere, everytime. It just worked. You can see the attraction. At it's peak, flash was installed on something like 92% of all computers. Something like 99% of all web connected computers had flash running. It was too tempting of a honeypot. If you could find a security vulnerability in flash, you could break into any computer, regardless of the operating system. Unfortunately this is what happens when a single piece of software captures a huge marketshare. And it's always an expensive nightmare to fix. Similar thing happened to windows when it first grabbed a huge share of the OS market and it took Microsoft probably 5 versions over 15 years (and heaps of money) to fully get on top of the security issue. Then came HTML5 that built a lot of the plugins into the browser. This has reintroduced the problem of unsupported codecs, which makes the step from flash to HTML5 a backward step in some respects. But the codec ecosystem is much more dominated by a few players (webm and mp4 h264) these days, so it's less of a problem than it was in the 90s. With alternatives that were kinda better and kinda not much worse, and a product that was still years away from fixing its security issues, developers started to move away from flash. And as they did, the pots of money that could be made from selling developer tools dried up. And as it did, so did Adobe's enthusiasm for the product.",
"It's used to make animation and advertisement, it's what's in the background to power the visuals, and attachments on websites",
"ELI5: Why did Adobe kill off flash and did not milk it like any other of their products? I remember they decided to decommission flash when html5 was still an infant. If they kept improving flash, it would exceed what html5 does today. They already had such a large market share.",
"So you probably use Chrome or maybe Firefox. Chances are you’ve installed an extension or two? Like an adblocker? Scary right? You don’t know whether you can trust the author to not do bad things to your computer either intentionally (malware) or unintentionally (security hole). In the 2000’s, you had to install extensions called plugins to do things you now take for granted, like watching videos, playing 2D or 3d games, or even listening to music files. Anybody could write a plug-in and they could be risky since you didn’t know if you could trust what you were installing. Sometimes plugins would also force you to install weird toolbars on your browser or make you get pop ups on every site you went to. It was also a pain in the butt to find the right plug-in for the site you were using, make sure it was up to date, etc. Flash was a very very popular and trustworthy one of these plugins that revolutionized media on the web and became a standard. But now browsers can do all the things Flash can do without plugins, which means none of the risky drawbacks that come with plugins. So it’s better and safer to just do it the browser way instead of the plug-in way.",
"They want people to move onto a faster, more secure standard, that can do the same things as flash can do.",
"Along with the many reasons mentioned by others there's something everybody seems to forget: At its peak it was being abused to serve you the most obnoxious ads possible. Animated ads with loud unmuteable sound, that would play over and over until you left the page. Flash was the reason I originally started using ad blockers. It was also being abused to serve weirdly designed websites where, since they were entirely built in a flash object, were inherently incompatible with standard navigation features like \"forward\" and \"back\" and even appearing on search engines. All in the name of having some silly animation on the menu or page transitions or something else that looked fancy but actually got in the way of usability. Websites designed as a flash object were also cumbersome, clunky, slow, most often awkward to navigate, and from the designer's standpoint, more or less a pain in the ass to maintain and update when content needed to change. In that regard I've always perceived it more as a marketing feature than a useful (in the practical way) feature. Everybody knew this but there were no practical alternatives. Eventually better alternatives appeared and the world could finally move on from that abomination and pretend it never existed. I'm thankful that it was just a phase because it was more a problem than a solution. Before Adobe it was known as Macromedia Flash, and it had a cousin whose name I forget (was it Macromedia Shockwave?) that did more or less the same things and was equally impractical. It was also eventually discontinued."
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ko85ik | how exactly did the mechanism Stephen Hawking used to communicate work? Like what did he input, and how did the machine output it into words? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't know the physical input he used, however his voice generator was an iteration of an early voice synthesis made by Dennis Klatt. It consists of three parts: the first takes english text as input and converts it into a string of phonemes. Each phoneme is a very exact classification of the sound we are able to produce with our mouth and throat. The second part converts the phonemes into a string of parameters in sets of 19 per time unit (for example 19 parameters per every 50 milliseconds) These 19 parameters are what is used by the third part, the \"voice synthesizer\", to generate a digital sound wave resembling speech. The synth is a carefully handcrafted set of oscillators, noise generators and filters that model how sound is shaped by our bodies.",
"If I remember rightly, it was all pretty cutting edge stuff. In anticipation of his impending loss of speech they held sessions where they had him catalogue as many words as possible while he could still speak clearly. They fixed him up with voice activated typing and a joystick at first so he could keep writing. Later, they devised a system that tracked his eye movement as he looked at things on his view screen. When this system was perfected it was merged with his speech library enabling him to \"talk with his eyes\". Edit: I stand corrected. The voice was synthesized based on another man's."
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ko88ty | How does sound become embedded into vinyl records? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A vinyl has grooves that go up and down a bit like a rocky road they make the needle vibrate , on the other side of the needle there is a magnet that when the needle vibrate it makes the magnet go up and down past a coil that generates electrical currents that are fed to an amplifier to make sound"
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ko980y | What is making the sound when people are switching on lights in big rooms or hangars in movies? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The \"bull switch\" or mains breaker. The main circuit breaker handle between the mains power inlet and the downline distro connections. Has a heavy spring loaded handle that \"Thunks\" satisfyingly when pulled either on or off. - 728 union Gaffer",
"Lighting Contractors. Regular switchs cant handle all that current so they wire the switch to open & close the contactor or contactors which are designed to handle the load of all the lighs. Thats why you see them come on in sections or staggered, multiple contactors. ***Edit****contractors=contactors"
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koecg7 | How do streaming websites like Twitch can handle that much outgoing bandwidth? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's all about scaling and load balancing. If you're streaming to 10k people, you aren't actually sending your stream straight to those 10k people. You're sending your stream to Twitch, who distributes that stream out across dozens -- if not hundreds or thousands - of servers, which then send the content back down to your viewers. It might add up to terabytes per second overall, but that load is spread across hundreds of georedundant nodes that balance the load to avoid bottlenecks.",
"Well they are owned by Amazon, who has a large bandwidth capacity due to their cloud services"
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koh0c4 | - “bits” as in 8-bit, 16-bit art and gaming systems | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bit is a single number: 0 or 1. If you combine several bits together you can write larger numbers, like 00, 01, 10, and 11 are ways to write 0, 1, 2, and 3 respectively. A digital image is really just a series of numbers: a number for how red the upper-left part should be, a number for how green the upper-left part should be, a number for how blue the upper-left part should be, then similar triples for each other part of the image. An 8-bit image uses 8-bit numbers, which range from 0 to 127, for each of those. A 16-bit image uses 16-bit numbers. Computers (gaming systems) store everything as numbers, not just images. A 16-bit system is designed to work with 16-bit numbers easily, and needs to work harder to accommodate larger numbers and wastes space when dealing with smaller numbers. Edit to add an actual 5 year old analogy: Suppose that you are practicing writing and adding numbers at school. Your teacher gives you strips of paper with four blanks each to write numbers on. This is a 4-bit system. If you want to write down numbers like 3047 and 1382, this system is perfect. If you want to write down numbers like 12, 73, 42, and 18 you can do that too. You could even save space by writing two of these shorter numbers on the same strip, but then you need to remember that 1273 is the number 12 and the number 73, not the number 1273. If you want to write down numbers like 17345 you have to tape two strips of paper together.",
"The \"bits\" of a game system mainly represents how big an integer (whole numbers, positive or negative) can be that it can do math on at once. The NES was 8-bit, and could add two number together as long as they were 8 bits long. If you wanted to add 16 bits together you needed to use 2 CPU instructions to do it. Memory access sometimes comes into play as well especially in more modern systems, but early CPUs often had different rules about memory access and arithmetic input sizes. In terms of graphics, they weren't directly related. Older systems had more primitive graphics processors with more limits. The CPU was often a separate piece of hardware from the graphics processor. Said processor built the screen image pixel by pixel based on sprite sheets and a listing of what went where, and a grid of tiles for the background. The limits were usually of how many tiles were allowed in a given area and how many unique colours were allowed within a single tile. So saying graphics looked 8-bit is really just saying that game systems at that time tended to have these graphical limits. The next generation would have improvements across the board, for the CPU, the graphics and the audio. And repeat for each iteration.",
"A bit is basically a tiny little switch in a computer. Bits can only ever be on or off, which you'll often hear called 1 and 0. When programming computers, we like to be able to work with numbers bigger than 1, so we've invented a way of counting higher by putting bits together in a way that we call the binary number system, or just binary. In binary, each bit represents a number that's twice the last one. The first bit represents 1, the second 2, the third 4, the fourth 8, and so on and so forth. If the bit is on, you add the number it represents to the total, like so (smaller bits are on the right): 10110 - > 16 + 0 + 4 + 2 + 0 = 22 01101 - > 0 + 8 + 4 + 0 + 1 = 13 As it turns out, using this system you can represent any number if you have enough bits. But how many is \"enough\"? That's where 8-bit, 16-bit, and so on come in. With 8 bits we can store numbers up to 255. With 16 bits, up to 65,535. 32 bits gives us numbers up to 4,294,967,295. An 8-bit computer has enough switches in it that it can perform math on numbers up to 255 directly. If you want to use numbers bigger than that, you'll need to come up with a clever way of storing one number into multiple sets of 8 bits, which makes the computer slower. Obviously, 255 is not a very big number, so as soon as it became affordable to add more switches to the machines, we did. Side note: \"8-bit art\" is just a term for pixel art that looks like the kind of art you would see on an 8-bit game console. The number of bits does not directly affect the kind of graphics a computer can display, but 8-bit consoles were much slower than modern computers and could not run graphics that were very fancy. Side note 2: You may hear about a \"memory limit\" related to bits. For instance, 32-bit computers can't use more than about 4 Gigabytes of memory (4.29 billion bytes, to be exact). Why? Because 32-bit computers can't count higher than 4.29 billion! Each byte needs to be numbered (so the computer can know which one is which) and after that you run out of numbers to give them!"
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kohcwm | - In programming, what is serialization? | ELI5 In programming, explain what serialization is and what purpose it serves or problem it solves. Please and thank you. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's the act of taking some data structure - a hashtable, an employee record, a customer's order, a map in a video game - and turning it into a sequence of bytes that can be saved. Maybe to a file on disk, maybe sent out a network to another computer somewhere else in the world. In general, \"how do I save this data?\" is going to be a common question in the program you write, and the process of preparing that output is serialization. Once you have the serialized version, saving a file on disk is the easiest thing in the world. Similarly, unserialization is turning it back into the original data when loading from disk, etc."
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kois4n | How do Apple Watch and AirPods charge so quick but last so long? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have very small batteries so they charge quickly. The watch and pods chips are custom designed for each to have extremely low power consumption, so the charge lasts a long time.",
"Think of the battery of your device as a bucket which holds water. When filling the bucket (charging) the hose used has a large diameter and a lot of water flows through into the bucket. However the outgoing hose is small in diameter and not much water is needed from the bucket, so the flow rate of the water (how much water passes a given point in a given amount of time) is low, so the water in the bucket lasts much longer."
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kokzg1 | Why is the color Prussian Blue unable to be accurately displayed on screens? | On Prussian Blue’s Wikipedia page it says: “Like most high-chroma pigments, Prussian blue cannot be accurately displayed on a computer display.” What exactly does this mean, and what is it specifically about the pigment that causes this | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The way computer screens, our eyes and colour work are all very complicated. Essentially, computer screens emit light at 3 wavelengths (red, green, blue, rgb) and mix them to simulate other colours. This works fairly well for most things, but there are limitations. Since a computer screen only emits light, other phenomena arent accurately captured. One of these is absorption, which is what prussian blue does. When a pigment does one of these effects, we can simulate its colour with a computer screen, but not the way it interacts with light around it (which actually dictates a lot of how we perceive our vision). Another (simpler) example is something like vantablack. Since there is no way to simulate black on a computer screen other than turning off the pixels, you cant really tell the difference between something like vantablack or specifically lit black felt. ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) is a good 20 minute video if you have the time).",
"You can think of it this way, the color of Prussian Blue is a more saturated ('high-chroma') blue than the blue that is displayed in your monitors blue pixels. Therefore, the blue pixels alone don't display the color well. But you also can't get any help by adding in light from the red and green pixels, since (color-wise) they are pulling you in the opposite direction! The result is that you cannot display the color well on a monitor. To think about this more completely, it is helpful to look at a chromaticity diagram: URL_0 If you look at the above chart, you can see that the colors you can make by averaging red, green, and blue, lights are just the ones inside the triangle. Outside the triangle, the color is not represented well. And these outside colors are generally ones that are high in \"saturation\" or \"chroma\", which is defined as a color's distance from the center of the diagram. Pure wavelengths of light are also \"maximum saturation\" which is why it is also hard to capture a rainbow's colors accurately on a monitor.",
"If you painted a card with regular blue ink and put it in the sun, it would absorb the red-orange-yellow light and reflect back the blue. Prussian Blue is so intense because it actually takes some of that red-orange-yellow light, then converts it to blue and reflects it back. It appears to be glowing blue. If you took a photo of the two cards, the Prussian blue wouldn’t look special, because the photo isn’t made with Prussian blue. It’s a similar deal with your monitor, though in that case they’re both glowing. Even the ink card is giving off light, because it’s really a glowing image on a monitor, rather than absorbing light as it does in the real world. It’s a bit like laundry detergent with optical brighteners. They contain a fluorescent agent which converts some invisible ultraviolet light to visible light. This is why so many laundry detergents glow like crazy under a black light. Much of the light given off by a UV black light is in the invisible spectrum; a fancy one will emit very little visible light. A white towel that has never been washed with optical brighteners will be hard to see. Wash it with optical brighteners and it will glow blue. In the sun, it will look brighter too. why fluorescent-died stuff seems brighter than it should.",
"Screens emit too much light to properly showcase the texture and depth of Prussian blue. Unfortunately, your computer screen is not coated with the special pigment. This means that it cannot correctly display fluorescent colors, because it outputs in RGB (Red, Green, Blue) which cannot clearly represent the hue and brightness that the human eye perceives when examining a fluorescent material.And that's why fluorescent colors do not appear accurately on computer screens. URL_0 . Tbf all I did was google why it can't be done",
"I wonder if this holds true for \"hdr\" monitors. They have a larger gamut (\"gamut\" is the description of what colors a monitor can display).",
"It's not really something special about the pigment, as much as it's about the limitations of your monitor. Most computer monitors are lcds with a white backlight, and some of that light bleeds through even when a pixel or subpixel is supposed to be displaying black, so with something like prussian blue, there will be more red light coming out of the monitor than would be reflected off the pigment in reality. There's also the issue of which wavelengths are the most selective in which type of cones they stimulate, and how tightly your monitor's color filters select for that one specific wavelength. Basically, you can display yellow by combining red and green, but you can't make your red more red by mixing in other colors."
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konbju | How do internet cookies work? Example: How is youtube able to know I visit disc golf sites and then give me ads for the sport? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cookies themselves tend to be teeny tiny little text files. They almost never store much data. They usually are a couple configurations for some visual settings then the real important thing is an ID number. Like a site will say \"this guy is #214412\" then all the other sites they partner with can say \"ah here is that #214412 guy\" and then can look up in whatever database all the partner sites share all the other stuff they know about you. Like basically cookies have very little actually stored in them, but they store enough so the site knows who you are, then they can look it up on their end in whatever database they have made."
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kone3o | why every video- and musicplayer seems to have difficulties loading videos or audio from any point but the very start? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"* Most videos use inter-frame compression. To save space, only some frames (called I-frames) are properly stored. For frames in-between (P-frames and B-frames), there is only description on how to move and change chunks of I-frames. So if person who encoded the video wanted to save a lot of space, maybe even half-second or more goes without proper I-frame. If you want to seek to random place, you might have to load I-frame and all the changes that happened since, then apply all those motions and changes. Bonus points if you use mechanical hard drive which makes loading even slower. You can see how this type of compression works when in TV or live-stream some frames get lost. I've seen some players to deal with missing I-frames by assuming they are completely colored middle gray, then you see ghosting for few moments. Some players do similar things when you do seeking, you just get glitchy video for few moments. But most players just wait a second while everything needed is loaded. * If you are watching online video or music, the beginning usually gets loaded immediately when you open page. When you seek to point that's not loaded, you'll have to wait while your computer sends request to the web server and receives response. For example, YouTube doesn't load whole video if it's long, it loads only next few seconds. Even bigger problem is if the video (or audio) you watch is not split into nice small chunks, but published as a whole and played by built-in player into your browser. What happens when you play such file is that browser starts to download it as any other file (from the beginning) and play it at the same time. When you want to seek into middle, you need to wait, while everything before that gets downloaded, you can't download file from middle. * Variable bitrate in videos and especially sound might cause problems. In modern audio or video compression, different amount of data is used to compress different parts. For example, when there is lot's of motion in the video, you might want to use more data to properly capture it. This poses some challenge. When you want to skip 50s forward, how should the player know where is this part located. It can't just skip 50MB forward if your average bitrate is 1MB/s, because that's only average. There has to be some index that say how the time relates to data. But you probably don't want to store index of each frame. So, as an example, if you have index every 10s and you want jump to 59s, you need to jump to frame at the beginning of the 50th second and read every frame to get to 59th second."
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kop5de | Neuroplasticity and what are the potential applications for artificial neuroplasticity ? | Is neuroplasticity the ability for brain to form new connections ? Is it the ability to alter psychological makeup ? Or both ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"oooooooh i like this question. i got into a conversation about neuroplasticity in regards to mental health on an ask reddit a couple of months ago. its super interesting. & #x200B; in general, neuroplasticty is the brain's ability to form neural pathways. these pathways are your personality in a way. if you think a certain way, if you like a certain color, if you always hold your pencil a certain way, any kind of habit your brain forms, neuroplasticity is how your brain retains that information. the more you do these things, the stronger that bond gets. the more you do new things, the more pathways your brain forms. & #x200B; now, in people with mental disorders, especially mood disorders, neuroplasticity is shown to be incredibly limited. thats why its hard to just \"stop being depressed\" or \"stop acting a certain way.\" your brain has a harder time forming those new neural pathways, and it sticks to the few it already has. & #x200B; so, artificial neuroplasticity, or even just therapeutically /medically enhanced neuroplasticity, could help people form new neural pathways. which could have much more benefit than just helping those with mental disorders. especially with people with brain damage, as it could allow them to essentially fix their brain. & #x200B; at some point in time, we may be able to design and implant neural pathways that would make people smarter, or teach them a new skill, or possibly implant outside memories into people's brains. nobody really knows what the limits of neuroplasticity are yet. we dont even really know how the brain works. & #x200B; this was a bit more like \"explain like im in a high school psych class,\" so let me try for a real \"explain like im five.\" & #x200B; when you are born, your brain is essentially a big empty field. as you get older, stuff starts to grow in that field. everything you do is shown by you walking across the field. the more you walk across the same spot, by doing the same thing, the more worn down that path is. that makes it easier to walk across. when youre much older, that field is now full of plants, vines and trees and flowers. the things you do most have given you paths that are very easy to walk across. you might have a few paths that arent as easy, but are still able to be crossed. trying something new, however, or trying to learn something new, means you have to walk where there is no path. if you have high neuroplasticity, your field is probably mainly grass, and its pretty easy to form a new path. if you have low neuroplasticity however, your field might be full of thorns and brambles, and its a lot harder to form a new path. and thats where we're hoping to be able to stimulate neuroplasticity. in minor cases, it would be like giving you a weed whacker and letting you cut down the stuff in your way to make a new path. still a bit of effort, but a lot easier. in major cases, like brain damage, it would be like getting a bulldozer and rebuilding a path that had a landslide and was previously inaccessible, and it completely artificial neuroplasticity, you would get a pre-built path and just lay it in your field, no work required. i hope that helps!"
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kor5c2 | What does Honey get out of being a free extension and giving me discounts? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Consider like an exclusive sale. The businesses pay honey to offer their users discounts and in return honey brings in more likely buyers to the business' website.",
"In addition to the reciprocal nature of the plugin [sending you to sites that pay to have you sent their way]( URL_1 ), Honey also aggregates and monetizes big data about all of its users (the standard [name, email, computer specs, shopping habits]( URL_0 )) and likely makes the lion's share of its income from selling that data. It gets sold on to advertisers who build profiles on you to determine how to best sell future products to you, much like Google, Facebook, and other large \"free\" sites will do with their collected data. EDIT: To address a point made by another poster, I was apparently unnecessarily reductive in saying that they \"sell\" your data, as I was trying to keep the post ELI5 friendly. For those interested: Honey, like many other websites, uses a variety of techniques involving the scraping of data from its users to make money, including ways that they are legally allowed to declare as not being a form of monetization. The easiest way to put it would be to say that while they are not literally writing down your details in a giant Excel spreadsheet to sell for hard cash on the information market to advertising companies, they are nonetheless collecting data, processing it either internally or through an external contracted ad agency, and then determining the best way to tailor their service to get you to buy the majority of products at stores for which they have deals and coupons. This is done with the explicitly stated purpose of sending you to stores they have deals with, making new deals with other stores, and in general producing monetary gains for their company. So, in spirit, but maybe not in law, they are \"selling your data\". The data, as their privacy policy makes clear, does indeed make its way into the hands of external businesses and advertisers from time to time, which then means it can be passed on many more times without you knowing. One company can have many policies which dictate how strict their data sales to advertisers and other third party agencies are, but that third party may not have quite so strict policies, and then the next person they sell it to may have even more lax policies... until you start getting spam Nigerian Email Scams on the new email you just used to sign up to Facebook with. The first company, or even the third or fourth in the chain may have taken \"good care\" of your data, but the farther you go down the chain, the more lax they are with your data. It's also worth mentioning that the \"anonymization\" of data for aggregate sharing and sales is rarely as anonymous as people are led to believe by the language included in these deliberately vague and occluded terms of service. [Browser fingerprinting]( URL_2 ) is a well known tactic by many advertising agencies on the web, requiring little else other than the specifics of your computer specs (which are often fairly unique) and a couple of websites you've visited in the past to be able to identify exactly who you are. I don't say all of this to poo-poo sites on the internet or even Honey itself. The app is probably a good exchange if you use it frequently. And, frankly, we live in a world now where if you're going to be monetized, you might as well work the system and get what deals you can get out of it in exchange. I just think it's worth being informed about how these sites really function so that you aren't caught off-guard if something ends up spilling down the line from the nth corporate merger Honey's owners do which ends up with the personal shopping habits of you and the other millions of users in the hands of someone who has far fewer scruples about how to take advantage of that information.",
"Amongst other things, it's probably collecting a horrifying amount of information about your shopping habits that they can sell to the highest bidder. To be honest, I don't know entirely how Honey works, because my suspicions about how they use your data makes me not want to go anywhere near it Never forget the mantra that if you're getting a service for free, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold",
"To anyone saying they sell your info, while that is common nowadays, a [30 sec search shows this is not the case]( URL_1 ). From their website: > We know how important your personal data is to you, so we will never sell it. We’ll only share it with your consent or in ways you’d expect (as we explain here). That means we will share your data if needed to complete your purchase, with businesses who help us operate Honey, or if we are legally required to do so. They go on to say, > Please know that when we share information with our service providers, it’s for the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy and not for their independent use. [A different ( and just as easy) search will reveal]( URL_0 ): > Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners when a member uses Honey to find the best available coupons or to activate our Honey Gold rewards program. We work with affiliates to help confirm your purchase so we can get a commission from the merchant. They then mention Honey Gold, a free rewards program they describe as > This is a win-win for our members and for us and it’s what allows us to provide a free service (and without selling anyone’s data). I'm generally very cynical of free programs selling information, but this sub is not for wrong information, if you are going to comment take the time to make sure you are right. So, TL;DR, Honey does not sell your information but rather makes commissions with included thirds parties to draw additional traffic to them."
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kos4py | how do the standby lights on electronics last so long? | I was looking at my TV and PlayStation 3 And realized that the red standby light has been on a majority of the time for the past so many years. How is this possible? Why wouldn't the light burn out? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"LEDs last a very long time and usually burn out from power spikes that would mess up the rest of the system"
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kosffh | How much of the new Apple Silicon chips did Apple actually design, given that the chips' ARM architecture is developed by another company? | Per [Wikipedia]( URL_0 ) the ARM architecture is developed by Arm Holdings, a British company. Given that the Apple M1 chip is an ARM-based chip, did Apple simply do minor customization on work mostly done by Arm Holdings or did it actually design substantial elements of the new chip? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My understanding is that the particular ARM license being utilized by Apple leaves the actual implementation entirely up to them. An analogy might be as if you licensed the internal combustion engine. This allows you the right to produce your own engine that consists of the basic elements and principals patented by the licensor, while the decisions of materials, optimizations, and the engineering of individual elements are up to you. You are permitted to simply copy the original design in it's entirety, or you can choose to develop bigger or lighter pistons. In this way, every or nearly every element of the end design may be further developed by Apple. There's really no way of knowing how much they actually chose to re-use or re-develop.",
"The license is needed for the instruction set architecture, not necessarily for the implementation. Ex. if the ISA states that when the multiplication instruction (which is encoded in such and such a manner) is executed, register C should contain A*B, it doesn't really matter how the multiplication itself is calculated. You can have a complex multiplier circuit. This would produce the correct result. or the processor could internally do a loop for A times, adding B each time. This would also produce the correct result, albeit extremely inefficiently. The program cannot tell the difference, because as far as it's concerned, an instruction is one whole indivisible thing. As long as whatever it expects to happen, happens, the program will execute correctly. As long as the processor can understand the ARM instruction set and produce the correct result for each instruction, then Apple is free to design their own implementation completely from scratch (which they probably did) and call it an ARM processor.",
"It’s a completely in house designed chipset. Architecture is more a specification on how things are laid out and how to use them. But it doesn’t say anything about how those things that are being laid out work or how they’re being made."
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koup20 | What does it mean when kids on video games say “Yeah it’s the new meta”? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In this context they're referring to the \"metagame\". When playing a video game, there's playing *the game*, the way it was originally intended to be played in a vacuum, using only knowledge about how the game works and devising strategies around that knowledge. But then, separately, there is also the \"metagame\". Where you start looking specifically about how other players right now play the game, and devising your strategies specifically to beat those players. That could mean coming up with some kind of strategy that, when looking at the game for what it is, may seem pointless or ineffective, but it turns out to be massively disruptive to another play style that is currently very popular, meaning you'd likely succeed if playing against people who are employing that popular strategy. So that makes it a sort of \"game within a game\". You're not just playing the video game itself, you're also playing mind games with other players and trying to outplay their tactics. The \"meta\" game. Commenting offhand about something being \"the new meta\" is someone who is looking at a new potential strategy and predicting that it may become a widely popular play tactic soon.",
"The \"metagame\" is the game between games. I.E. deciding wich strategy you play based on what you expect others to play Usually when a new strategy comes to be good and popular the rest of the metagame wraps around it. Play it, or have a plan to play against it. Announcing something \"new meta\" is usually an exaggeration to claim something is so good soon everyone will play it."
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kovu5d | why do speakers blow at a high setting | As the tittle says why do speakers blow when you turn them up to the highest setting why would manufacturers make it so that they could reach a setting that it would damage the speaker? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are several different things you could be referring to when you say 'speakers'. If you mean something like a boombox where everything is put together all in one unit, then there is no way that a manufacturer would make the highest volume damage the speakers, imagine all the terrible reviews it would get! If you're talking about the kind of speakers you use with a computer, where you plug them in with a 3.5mm jack and they have their own volume control, then the same applies since that cable only carries the audio signal and the speakers themselves will make sure they can't go loud enough to damage themselves. If you're talking about the kind of speakers you use in a hi-fi audio system, where the box contains only the transducer and filtering components and you wire them up with thick copper cables and screw terminals, then these can be damaged when you go to too high of a volume because the external system is deciding how much power to give them. Big, expensive speakers like the ones used in rock concerts need big, powerful drivers, whereas small ones in a home system will need much less power. If you plug in a small home speaker designed for a 100W output into a concert audio system capable of pumping out 10kW then crank up the volume to full then the speaker will probably break very quickly, since it just isn't designed to handle 100x its rated power"
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kowyxc | How can a 4K video look clearer on a 1080p display even though there aren't as many pixels on the 1080p display to show more detail in the 4K video? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Resolution (how many pixels you see) is not the only factor that determines video quality. Compression (how much information is lost in favor of smaller size) and related bitrate (how much information is displayed per second) is sometimes as much or even more important. When you are watching 4K video on a 1080p display your computer is still using the high bitrate of the 4K video to play the file. Some people also mentioned that many 1080p videos are not really 1080p because of how the particular codec (compression algorithm) works.",
"Well, if we're talking streaming video here, when they encode the video for 1080p they'll compress it far more than they do the 4K one, simply because they can--people aren't going to notice loss of detail due to compression artifacts as easily on 1080p as they are 4K. So, the 4K video will have fewer such artifacts and will generally be higher quality. Same applies on Youtube or the like--viewing a 1080p video on a 720p display will generally look better than viewing the same video at 720p on the same display.",
"4K video looks better on 1080p display because theoretically that's what supposed to happen. Images and Videos are down-sampled and compressed significantly because at end of the day it's all about how it looks to human eyes. If multifolds of reduction in size can be achieved by compromising few percentage in quantity, it is wise thing to do. Each pixel in display has Red, Green and Blue LEDs. So each image need three distinct value of intensity of LEDs for each pixel. But these intensities of each pixel of Images and Videos are generally stored in three different variables called Y,Cb, and Cr. It is converted to intensities of RGB LEDs while displaying it on the screen. The reason to use three different variables is that human eyes are more sensitive to Y variables and less sensitive to Cb and Cr. So in most of the cases, each pixel has individual Y value but four adjacent pixels have the same Cb and Cr value. Again, the reason is to decrease the file size. 4K display has four times the pixels than 1080p. So while displaying 4K on 1080p, Along with Y, each pixel has separate Cb and Cr value as well. So Image or video seems more clearer. We are obviously oversimplifying because compression and Codec of the video files are not considered. But this is the general theory behind observed improvement in video quality while displaying it on screen with lesser resolution. TLDR; Images and Videos are down-sampled and compressed to reduce the file size while having some but not substantial compromise in quality. So while displaying them on screens with lesser resolution, effects of the down-sampling and compression reduces and quality is improved. But the improvement in quality is not that substantial and again it proves the legitimacy and ingenuity of down-sampling and compression methods.",
"Another reason why video may look clearer - it is shot with a modern high end camera and is processed on a high end gear in highest resolution possible. The better the uncompressed master video is - the better the video will look even in compressed form when you stream it.",
"I do video transcoding and rendering for a living. You see, 4K videos are filmed using 4K cameras with much more expensive low-noise sensors and usually a better lens. This improves 50% of the video quality that you watch. The 30% the quality improvement is the fact that you're playing the 4K video with higher bitrates than a 1080p video. Higher bitrates mean better quality, more colors and less pixelated motions. Other Redditors touch on another real point on pixel format that videos are transcoded in. This is the last 20% of the quality improvement. Videos are transcoded with high emphasis on pixel brightness but not colors, so that they can compress the video size down by half or so. They call it chroma subsampling. Imagine the screen first showing a grayscale image of real 1080p pixels. But then they might paint only 540p worth of colors on top of it. It's 1080p but the colors seem to bleed out, making it a bit blurry. Now if you play 4K video, the player will decode into 1080p grayscale and then paint 1080p worth of colors on top of it, so you see everything in real resolutions.",
"Apart from image-related explanation, a simple way to explain this is about information. A 4k-video has more information than a 1080p-video. A 720p-video, on the other hand, has less information. Any algorithm (here: video-decoders) will attempt to scale the information to the display. That means, smaller videos will be upscaled, bigger videos are downscaled. Upscaling means you have to “invent” information, that is, fill in the pixels which are “missing” from the video. And, as you cannot just “create” information, you will see that the video is pixelated. Downscaling, on the other hand, means to throw information away. And that is much easier. Why 4k-videos look cleaner than 1080p-videos on a 1080p-screen is simply because you have more information available for the algorithm to choose from when it comes to deciding what should be thrown away. Hence, transitions look more fluid. A 1080p on 1080p means that all the available information will simply be displayed as it is, which makes display faster, but will also display any compression artifacts.",
"The answer is called Chroma Subsampling. This would apply to streaming video, normal television, movie theaters, and even blue-rays and DVDs. The idea is to transfer information more quickly for higher refresh rates. This wouldn't matter as much today, but we established the practice a long time ago and all of our 480, 720, and even 1080 recording devices use chrome subsampling. Basically, all the pixels on your screen are grouped in to 4s and one of those 4 is just 'brightness.' The idea is that we can't tell the difference, but in reality your image is only 3/4 of the resolution it claims to be. When you receive 4k resolution worth of information, it is enough info to light all 4x pixels correctly. So watching a 4k video on a 1080 screen still shows a bit more information then watching 1080 video. TL/DR: You are just seeing REAL 1080p. 1080p video is actually 810p.",
"If you mean that a 4K video on a 1080p display has more detail than a 1080p image, first we have to talk about what the objective reference is: The display isn't capable of more detail than its maximum color gamut and resolution, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every 1080p source you've seen contained the maximum amount of detail a 1080p stream could carry. So a few things can be happening here: 1. Your 1080p reference might be a film that was poorly transferred to 1080p. 2. The transmission system is still transmitting much more data for the 4K stream, and consequently it can push the color gamut as far as 1080p will display it, versus a 1080p stream that was optimized some years ago for slower data connections. 3. Some bitstreams may have been encoded in H.264 instead of H.265 HEVC which is tremendously more efficient, thus transmitting even more data within the 1080p color and resolution gamut than was ever captured in the older H.264 stream of the same, optimized for slower connections. 4. The cameras, lenses and recorders used on the 4K production, which really begin with 8K RAW, working their way down to a 4K Digital Intermediate, may be much newer and may be capturing more detail with far less generation loss than a poorly archived 35mm interpositive that was wet gate transferred to ANY format. tl;dr: Everything from newer digital cameras, lenses and recorders, to newer codecs to faster data connections to lack of generation loss makes for a better experience in 1080p than was possible even just 5 years ago.",
"Generally, in a raw format where all data is transmitted for all pixels uncompressed, it wouldn't make much difference. In practice there are 2 things that would affect the quality: There are different techniques used to add up and average the pixels (there are 4 pixels in 4k to 1 pixel at HD). At most basic, the scaler has to cram the average of 2x2 pixels into a single pixel. A high end scaler wouldn't just average down every 2x2 pixels to make a new pixel - it would look at the bigger picture trying to reduce aliasing, averaging bigger areas, looking for contrast lines and places where it can make the underlying picture more natural. This is of course complicated when it's not a perfect geometric multiple, such as how the various '4k' standards aren't just double 1920x1080. some are 4000x2000 (simplified example). In those cases it has to do all sorts of cleverness to avoid moire patterns among many other artifacts. Secondly, we use compression to increase the amount of information we can fit down the limited pipes of the internet. This compression has loss. You've seen it before with the blockiness that happens when a stream drops to a lower quality level, or even when a picture is encoded with a low data jpg compression. Uncompressed, 4k would take 4x as much space as HD 1080p. That's 4x as much information to decide what to put into each pixel. Compressed, it's probably closer to 2-3x as much data. Each compression 'mistake' that happened at 1080p has no opportunity to be fixed and shows up as incorrect, blurry, or blocky pixels. When starting with 4k data...even compressed it has 2-3 more opportunities to be correctly interpreted at the higher bitrate since there's more underlying information to work with.",
"Besides other reasons given here, there's could be codec involved. 1080p on Youtube for example used AVC (H264) while 4k used VP9. For the same quality AVC consumes about twice as much bitrate as VP9.",
"Higher bitrate. When video files are compressed, they take advantage of different methods of compressing the data. As 4k video is higher quality, it possess a higher bitrate, resulting in a less compressed but higher quality video that takes up more space. URL_0 URL_1",
"Details in the picture are lost when compressing video and 4K video contains more details than 1080p video which will be visible even on a 1080p display. There are many parameters for video encoding that will impact the quality, and it is definately possible to have 1080p video that looks better than 4k,but typically the reverse will be true. One factor, as has been mentioned by others that has an obvious impact is chroma subsampling. While the uncompressed video will be 4k or 1080p, internally the resolution can be lower. This is normally described by something like YUV420, YUV422, YUV444. A video frame is a grid of pixels, and on the TV these may be a grid of red, green and blue LEDs. But internally in the video stream the color information is encoded not as red, green and blue, but as one value for brightness and 2 values for color information for each pixel. As normal video content often has a similar color on adjacent pixels, a common way to reduce the video size is to reduce the color information, but keep the details on brightness. This means that a blue gradient image, such as a sky will look good, pixel 1 and pixel 2 and pixel 3 and 4 are all blue, but the intensity of the blue is different. This is chroma subsampling. Color can be averaged and kept as one single value from 4 pixels but kept as one single value, while brightness is kept as 4 values. If we assume that the YUV pixel format is used, each uncompressed pixel could be described with 3 bytes. One for Y. One for U and one for V. 4 pixels would be 12 bytes. But by discarding some detail, this could be half, 6 bytes by have 4 bytes of Y and 1 bytes each of U and V. This means that a 1080p video only has 540 rows of color information. But a 2160p (4k video) has 1080p rows of color information, so it should look better on a 1080p display even if all compression artifacts are identical otherwise. This is not the only factor. Video is also encoded as larger blocks, like 16x16 pixels. You know those blocks that may be seen when there are some problems, or a very compressed video. A 4k video played on a 1080p display would be scaled down, so a 16x16 block would be displayed as a 8x8 block on the tv."
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koxgsz | Watts, amps, volts and joules whats the difference? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electricity is hard to visualise, so a trick is to visualise it like a fluid. An electric circuit becomes like a system of pipes where generators are like pumps, resistors are like narrow sections, and so on. In this visualisation Volts are like pressure and Amps are the amount of flow. Joules measure energy and Watts measure power (which is rate of energy exchange), and they relate to the 'work' that can be done by these flows and pressures. Imagine a waterwheel in this water circuit and imagine it is doing some work like winding up a pulley to lift up some weights from a pile at the bottom to a pile at the top. Joules measure the amount of energy, so you could use them to describe how big your piles of weights are at the top or bottom. Watts measure the rate of energy flow (Joules per second), so you could use them to describe how quickly your waterwheel can lift up weights (how powerful it is). If you want to increase the power of your waterwheel, you can increase the pressure (similar to increasing the voltage in an electrical circuit) or you could open a valve in the pipe wider and increase the flow (that is the current, which would be Amps if it was electrical).",
"Watts is a rate of flow when you multiply the voltage times the amperage you get \"watts\" of electricity. Amperage could be explained as the \"volume\" of electricity or how much flow their is (basically how big the pipe is) where volts are how much \"pressure\" (how fast the electrons move) Joules are an unrelated measurement of energy"
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