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koznif | why aren't cars protected underneath? Why aren't they enclosed in some kind of cowling or shield? Would that help to prevent damage and rust? Is there any way to enclose your car in a shield? Would it help anything? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can add an oil coating to prevent rust which can help. The issue with a cover is if water and salt slowly get under there over time they would be hard to wash off and would end up staying and causing rust just as much as if the parts were exposed. Also, there are hot parts like the exhaust that you wouldn’t want to cover up to avoid too much heat staying in the car and possible fires. And it would make maintenance more difficult and expensive. Lastly it would add to the cost of the car. If you have an old car you’re probably wishing they’d done more from the factory to make it last longer. But *if you were buying a new car* would you be willing to pay more for a car that will last longer? The manufacturer only cares about selling you a new car, not how long it lasts you. Customers will demand cars that are reliable and will pay more for cars they think will last, but this has its limits.",
"Some vehicles are. For many environments though, a bottom body skin could be problematic. It would slow down drying when moisture inevitably gets in. And may even collect water and debris. It might be difficult to keep clean enough to prevent clogged drainage holes, especially if you live in a climate where they commonly salt and sand the roads. For mechanics without access to a lift, it would be a huge pain getting it out of the way to do anything.",
"Cars are a combination of compromises, additional protection comes with additional weight and cost; so there needs to be a high demand and benefit for such a change.",
"Off road vehicles often have metal skid plates under sensitive parts like the engine and transmission. The idea is to prevent large rocks from damaging the drivetrain. They don't care that much about hitting the floor or frame as it won't cause immediate problems. Many race cars have plastic or carbon fiber plating under the car. Although this is not there to protect, it aids aerodynamics (a flat bottom creates less drag). In fact, some new cars come with this to help improve fuel economy. As other have said, plating won't really help rust but metal plating will help prevent immediate damage. However, the kind of damage it will protect from is when a tall, pointy object gets under the car. This really only happens when trying to drive over something. So it's not really a problem that happens on the street."
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kp5u42 | I always hear that for large amounts of CGI in movies and TV shows it costs a lot of money. What is costing so much money? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You probably have a preconceived notion that CGI is cheap. Because lots of shows, particularly animated shows, are filled with CGI these days. Or they're entirely CGI these days. You'd be hard-pressed to find a children's show airing on TV these days that isn't CGI produced for example. So it's a reasonable assumption to make that CGI must be some kind of relatively cheap way to do things. Basically like cheating. The difference, though, is that CGI in shows like that are cheap because they can take advantage of the same assets and use them over the course of an entire show. Take a show like Paw Patrol -- nearly every single episode, the animators are going to use the same exact character models, the same exact environments, probably a lot of the same objects as well. The animations are floaty and not very convincing, because they don't really have to be. Some of their animations might also be reused, or serve as bases to be tweaked into whatever they need for minimal effort. Creation of all these assets probably wasn't cheap, but once they have them, they can be reused for season after season. The only cost at that point for the animation is spending the time to animate the sequences, and maybe create a few extra assets unique to that one episode. This is way less expensive than something like hand-drawn animation, where very little can be re-used since it all needs to be drawn from scratch. Though, hand-drawn is also computer assisted these days, it's why shows like Family Guy look far more rigid than they did in their earlier seasons. With a large-budget live-action film, though, this game is completely changed. Now, you don't get the luxury of reusing anything. Every frame of that film where CGI is used is going to be a unique frame with some kind of unique effect going on. All of those frames have to be hand-crafted, and any assets they need will need to be created completely from scratch for the film. On top of this, they also need to put in a lot more effort to make the CGI look realistic (if that's what they're going for) and seamlessly blend it in to the shot using complex techniques. That inflates the cost *a lot*. We're essentially talking the difference between a toy space ship you can buy at Walmart and an actual billion-dollar satellite built by NASA. The Walmart painting probably did have a considerable price, but once they hashed out the design and built a factory to mass manufacture it, it could be mass produced with ease and sold relatively cheaply. But that billion-dollar satellite is one-of-a-kind, and was made completely from scratch using very expensive tools and put together by some of the most talented people in their field. And it's mostly only good for a single launch. EDIT: Also worth mentioning: if you have a film that is purely live-action, you're going to need resources that are tailored to this kind of production. Sets to shoot, physical actors, cameramen, lighting experts, practical effect technicians, costume and makeup artists stunt doubles, audio engineers, props and prop designers, extras, the works. And all the catering and human resources that that expects. With a CGI-only film, you'd probably replace a lot of that with lots of animators, riggers, digital artists, and that jazz. A film that is purely one or the other only has to dip into one of these. But a film that tries to marry the two together has to pay for both. Or more likely, contract a firm that can provide one or both of these parts for them.",
"Basically, you have to pay the salaries of all the artists creating the computer graphics, people who have gotten special training and know how to use those programs, spending months working on the film.",
"The software costs money, the computers they run it on costs money, and it takes quite a while for it to actually be done and you have to pay the salaries of all the people working on it (who I assume get paid fairly well)",
"The CG doesn't just fall out of the sky. There are dozens of people working every day for months/years to produce that work for a show or movie, and they require compensation."
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kpbnhp | how can NAND (not both) be used to represent all logical operations (and, not, or)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can make a NOT gate by just feeding two of the same thing into a NAND: that is, x NAND x = NOT x. Now that we have a NOT, you can make an AND by running a NAND into a NOT (since a NAND is itself just the opposite of an AND), that is, NOT (x NAND y) = x AND y. And finally, you can build an OR as NOT ((NOT x) AND (NOT y)). Think about it: x OR y is false exactly when *both* x is false and *y* is false, while (NOT x) AND (NOT y) is *true* exactly when both are false. So reversing one leads to the other. (You can do the same thing with a NOR gate, by the way, or NOT + either AND or OR.)",
"A signal NANDed with itself gives you a NOT. NOT a = NOT (a AND a), since x AND x = x, = a NAND a, since NOT (x AND y) = x NAND y. —- NANDing two signals and then passing the result through a NOT gives you an AND. a AND b = NOT NOT (a AND b), since NOT NOT x = x, = NOT (a NAND b), since NOT (x AND y) = x NAND y. = (a NAND b) NAND (a NAND b), from above. —- NOTing the signals and then passing them through a NAND gives you an OR. a OR b = NOT NOT (a OR b), since NOT NOT x = x, = NOT ((NOT a) AND (NOT b)), by DeMorgan’s Law, = (NOT a) NAND (NOT b), since NOT (x AND y) = x NAND y. = (a NAND a) NAND (b NAND b), from above."
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kpfyz9 | Why do we not see satellites in photos of the earth? Or when astronauts on the ISS take videos outside of the station? Where are they? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are tiny and we keep the satellites far far away from the space station. Just think of it like this, if you can't see your house from space how would you see a car sized satellite.",
"You can actually photograph the ISS or satellites. It just takes much longer exposure. SpaceX satellites, in particular, there are so many of them that it looks like a clear line in the sky, if you try to take a photo. This is actually a problem for astronomers, as there are so many satellites that is nearly impossible to get a clear shot of the sky. This is an example URL_0",
"Most footage taken outside the ISS is taken in daylight or under bright work lights. The exposure settings of the cameras are therefore adjusted accordingly. Stars and satellites are very faint objects. The cameras is unable to pick up these faint light at the same time as the Sun or other bright lights is shining on foreground objects. But satellites do sometimes appear in images taken on Earth during night. When the cameras are configured to low light conditions with high exposure times so that they can capture the stars and other faint lights they do sometimes pick up satellites as streaks as they cross the night sky.",
"Think of a tennis ball. That's earth. Now think of the tennis ball inside of a basketball, like right in the middle of the basketball. The basketball is like the area where satellites are all orbiting the earth. There's a lot more room for them to be chillin up there, and there is room for stuff down here. Now imagine you're in the middle of the ocean (which is most of earth). You look around and you see.. nothing. Now imagine you're on the basketball instead of the tennis ball. You look around.. Compared to everything on earth (buildings, forests, cities, skyscrapers, mountains, etc.), there's just some satellites on the 'basketball' of earth's orbit. You look around. Of course you see nothing. There's just not that much up there, and it's pretty small in comparison to skyscrapers and mountains. So you don't really see it. And space agencies also send stuff up there in a way that makes sure that their satellites and space junk don't run into each other, because that would be an expensive crash. So they keep things pretty far apart whenever possible."
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kphx0q | why does google allow apps like “Adblock” in their chrome store? Doesn’t it directly cost them YouTube revenue? Are they forced to have the apps avaliable? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Its because only a small portion of their hundreds of millions of users use adblock. They are not significantly impacted by it financially and if anything, the person displaying their ads is getting screwed over more than google.",
"Either allow it or deal with as an underground feature hidden inside another app. It's hard to stop determined programmers.",
"Ad blocking isn't really their concern, its not in huge use, and sophisticated users will find ways to block ads. In other words, there's not much to gain. However-- they are concerned about a different form of ad blocking -- ad fraud. There have been \"ad blockers\" in the past that had an additional feature, one that terrifies google and was quickly banned. It was an adblocker that blocked ads, but also clicked through to them, so google thinks the ad was clicked and the advertiser was charged. Now thats how you really screw with them, you make the ads they sell impossible to tell if people are actually interacting with them, which makes their value very low."
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kpj22g | How are graphics cards improved every year? How can you improve a product so consistently? | What exactly goes on to improve a card? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The most important factor is the manufacturing process. It's called \"photolit*h*ography\"- which means \"writing *in stone* with light\" (edit: Thanks for the correction). Basically, they're using a fancy Xerox to print electronic circuits onto a slice of silicon. Over the years, they have found ways to print circuits in finer details, which allows them to cram more stuff onto a piece of silicon. So they're improving the shape of the individual transistors to work better in small sizes and they're also using light with smaller wavelength, which is basically like getting a smaller brush size. In the past few years, they have started to work with a technology called \"EUV\", that is extreme-ultra-violet. Its \"brush size\" is 30 times smaller than the UV-light that causes tan and skin cancer. This is extremely difficult and expensive to work with, but it allows to cram billions of transistors onto a single chip: NVidias top chip, the GA100 used for their \"Tesla\" cards, has more than 50 billion transistors, compared to 20 billion on its predecessor that was made without EUV.",
"What I find more interesting is how two companies (AMD and Nvidia) can separately invest millions / billions of dollars and years of research and development and end up with basically the same level of performance. You would think there would be a bigger divergence.",
"Graphics cards rely on transistors to do work. Over time, we’ve figured out how to make transistors smaller and smaller (moving to a smaller “process node”). This lets you put more of them in the same space. There are other ways to improve your chip, too. Improving some aspects of the transistor itself without changing their size much can help. You can also change how these transistors are arranged on the chip. Another option is to add specialized clusters of transistors that are really good at one thing that would normally require more processing power, such as machine learning or ray tracing.",
"Since none of the comments seem to talk about architectural improvements(in terms of cpu design),here you go. CPUs are basically just switches interconnected with teeny tiny \"wires\" that carry data.The other comments tell how we add more switches every year. Assume a huge factory(cpu)with an attached warehouse(cache) and hallways with conveyer belts stretching out to 8 different doorways carrying items(instructions)that are further to be loaded onto a truck.What nvidia,amd and apple do is that they, * **add more cache**(sort of a very *quickly accesible warehouse* that cpu can ram around and fetch instructions) * **Better and wider pipelines**(The conveyer belts where the next set of orders that are to be moved to the truck are kept.We make this belts *wider and increase their carrying capacity* )In cpu terms,this is where the next set of instructions that are to be carried out are kept/operated on(for faster execution).Pipelining is basically moving 2 conveyer belts at the same time so as not to waste time with just bare belts with no items(instructions) to pick up. * Better **branch predictions**(*predicting which doorway the items need to go*).This cache thingy, mentioned earlier is very costly and takes up a lot of die space,hence it is very important to get the perf benefits/cache area used tradeoff right. As you cannot add as much cache as you want,you need to keep,only the ones that you're sure,will be needed *inside the cache* or else the precious die space is wasted.Hence it is important to know if package #263 will go to belt #4 or #6 before the manager tells you.(In cpu terms,predicting which way the program is gonna go and what instruction is going to be needed next)i.e better branch prediction can somewhat compensate for less cache. * They add dedicated **Hardware accelerators**(Nvidia NVENC,ISPs in mobile socs).*Small outlets with experts* for very popular items so you don't have to search and move them the conventional way which takes a lot more time. A few years ago,NPUs weren't even a thing,when it came to mobile computing,but as soon as AI and ML became ubiquitous,from recognising the faces in your groupies to getting the scenary right so the ISP knows where and when to turn the HDR/Night mode,on and off.These things are starting to command die spaces on their own. This is a one off since I don't really have a good analogy and this is only true for a GPU * Better **memory**(GDDR6X,HBM2).GPUs have dedicated memory,so that the gpu doesn't have to access the farther and hence slower system RAM and also don't need to compete for resources. ##### *As is the case with all eli5s,this is nowhere near an accurate representation of how cpus/gpus work and is drawn to give a basic outlook.",
"Besides just getting more transistors on a card as mentioned by others, you have to consider that expensive state of the art components made for one high industry become high end consumer products the next year when they can be produced cheaper. They don't include today's best chips in the world on a computer graphics card because it may cost $100,000, but next year, as they get better at making the product, as industries like render farms, military, healthcare imaging have covered the RD costs, it's now possible to price it for the consumer market. Even if it isn't the chips themselves, the chip forges are funded by many different imdistries.",
"You add more transistors. Sorry if this isn't enough words for an ELI5 post, but that's the basic premise. Fabrication plants are always working on smaller dies (10nm, 9nm, 7nm, etc) and as they shrink, it allows them to put more transistors on to the silicon, this means more power essentially. You will often note how many cores a GPU has, well those cores are made up of transistors (devices which are either on, or off , like a 1 or 0 in binary), more transistors = more cores = GPU that can do more than before. Couple this with awesome software tweaks and shortcuts, and thats how you get better GPUs ever year.",
"Another (maybe) related thing that's been bugging me for a long time and I want to use MGS4 and MGSV on the PS3 as an example. MGS4 (2008) look great for it's time and MGSV (2014) looks even better. But my question is, could the developer have achieved V graphics at 2008 but needed time to learn the machine or did they needed something else like better hardware for their PCs to develop on? **MGS4** URL_1 **MGSV** URL_0"
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kpllze | How foldering technique is better than straight up sending message? | I recently came across the foldering technique where instead of straight up sending message, they store their messages like drafts and then different person can access and read these messages. From what I have understood, this technique is better because the message is never sent and the suspicion is less. I am confused since, after writing a message, someone, inevitably, has to log in to the same server where the message is stored to be able to read it. Though the message might not be sent but authorities can still see which device logged into the server. In straight messaging, the authorities can see to which device the message was sent to and from where. So how is foldering less suspicious technique? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When one sends a normal email it is transmitted across multiple servers to reach it's end point. It's like the message is handed from person to person until it reaches it's destination. Any of those servers could maintain a copy of it. If the message isn't encrypted or perhaps only weakly encrypted then the owner of that server could read it. The foldering technique means that the message never leaves the server it's initially stored on making it more difficult for someone to read it other than those with access to that single server.",
"> Though the message might not be sent but authorities can still see which device logged into the server. Now that the technique is known, they're almost certainly looking for this. When it wasn't known, they likely weren't, or at least the people using it thought so. The government would go to the provider and tell them \"give me a copy of all the messages this account sends and receives\", and then they'd get nothing."
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kpnjz7 | Why do some card readers at the register seem like they take forever to process (asking debit/credit, double confirming total) and others are done completely in 3 seconds? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The reader only reads the card. It has to go thru internet connection to reach the bank to live process the transaction. If internet at the vendor is slow or being disrupted, the transaction can stall.",
"Oh! This is eli5, so longer version. The fast ones are connected to the internet to talk to the bank. All the steps go fast 'cause it makes the card thingy be close to the bank. The slow ones have to pick up a phone line, do a whole song and dance with the bank's phone-line thingy, *then* say \"hay, I gots a transaction\", *then* they be talkin and it happens.",
"One reason is pre-approved transaction limits. Not all transactions are approved in real time, sometimes the retailer and merchant will agree a limit below which the transaction is automatically accepted, so the terminal doesn’t need to contact the bank for approval. Back in the paper days of cards this was the default, anything below a certain value was accepted, over the value the store had to phone for approval. It’s decreasing given the greater connectedness of the world, but still does occur.",
"The card readers have to communicate with a bank or credit card company. So the communication time will depend on the business's telephone/internet service provider, just like for you streaming a movie or loading a webpage."
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kpqci0 | How are we able to charge our phones wirelessly, and why isnt that technology being used everywhere? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wireless charging is done through induction. When you run and electrical current through a coiled wire, you generate a magnetic field around it. Conversely, when a coiled wire experiences a change in the local magnetic field, it generates a current. So your charger runs an alternating current (AC) through a coiled wire. This generates a rapidly changing magnetic field. Your phone has a wire coil in its induction charger \"module\". This wire experiences the changes in magnetic field, which generate a current in the wire. This current is then used to charge the battery. The reason why we can't use this everywhere is that the power you can transfer with this method doesn't reach very far. Also, the more of these changing fields you have going around, the more likely for something else to be impacted, since this will induce currents in any wire coils, even if in other electronics.",
"The efficiency of wireless charging relies on good magnetic coupling between the devices. This means very little separation in the z-axis and very good alignment in the x-y axis. Even with phones this typically results in something less than 90% efficiency (compared to say 98%+ efficiency with a good transformer). For low power devices, this is tolerable. A phone can be charged with 5-10W power and the losses of 1-2 W will result in heat losses that can be mitigated (without it becoming dangerously hot). Laptops being charged at that rate are pretty useless (the laptop would be draining power faster than it charged). A laptop charger therefore, requires much more power (40W or more). Since laptops need thicker walls (for strength) this further reduces coupling efficiency. At that point, the heat loss is significant enough that it would cause both the charging device and the device being charged to have high temperature spots. This presents really difficult user, mechanical, electrical and safety design challenges. A laptop mfr typically works with a fairly small cost budget for chargers and very limited design time - this feature would just never make the cut. It gives a very small benefit, is expensive, adds significant design time and is prone to user error (perceived quality by user is low).",
"Like for what? It's used for toothbrushes and shavers. It only works for very low power devices. It's not efficient enough for most applications. GM used it to charge their electric Impact car, but that just wasn't cheaper than plugging in a connector.",
"Electricity as we think of it is actually electromagnetism. Those two words are combined for a reason, they're very closely linked. If you run an electric current through a wire, it produces a magnetic field around it. Similarly if you move a magnet along a wire, it makes an electric current in the wire. Chargers make use of these interactions to transfer electricity from the charger to the phone. However this is *very* wasteful and also very short ranged, so it's not a useful thing to do for most purposes.",
"Wireless charging is possible via a metal coil in both the charger and the phone, where a current is transferred via induction. Doing so is impractical beyond small applications such as phones due to a great wastage of power via heat, which is why it is not used everywhere.",
"Don't forget range. The induction between two coils falls off like r cubed, I think (someone check me??). So you have to be VERY close to the charger for it to work.",
"We *do* use it elsewhere. There are charging docks for video game controllers that use the same tech. Also my electric razor. The reason you don’t see it more is because of the pros and cons of the tech. The wireless charging station still needs to plug into a wall outlet, so it’s really only useful for something that you’ll be unplugging and re-plugging a lot. It’s also very very short range. Like physically touching. So, sure, you could make a toaster that wirelessly draws power from a docking station of some kind, but would that really be useful? What device do you think would benefit from wireless charging?",
"Energy is lost based on the inverse square law (1/r\\^2), making wireless charging incredibly inefficient even at close range, not to even mention long range.",
"Inductive charging is inefficient, so at high powers there will be **a lot** of loss. From an efficiency perspective it is always worse than a cable.",
"Wireless charging tech is still fairly ~~new~~ niche, only common in low power devices , and still has several drawbacks like fairly precise positioning, heat concerns in the charging brick, and some pretty complex internals for the thing being charged. This means that for higher duty stuff like a laptop, purely wired charging is still the way to go. That might change in the future, but right now, it's not a priority in the space."
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kpqkw6 | How does a DVD remember the subtitle settings? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not the DVD, it's the player. The player usually remembers, by an ID number on the disc, and it might know that disc 2 is \"the same movie\"."
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kpqzgp | With CPUs getting more and more cores, how come all games seem to be limited to the use of about 2-4? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most tasks in a video game are not easily “parallelized”. In other words, the outcome of one thing influences another thing. You could try sorting all the things, and finding groupings that eliminate the dependencies and interactions, but doing that is slower than just doing everything serially.",
"Software has to be specifically coded to use multiple cores. Managing all of the different threads becomes ever more complex as you increase their number. Also, as u/Jgordos says, you also have increasing dependencies on other things completing first. You cannot start a thread if you don't have the values required as inputs. EDIT: see also u/Pocok5's now buried [meta ELI5]( URL_0 ) Some low level tasks, like calculating discrete parts of a render, *can* be done in a highly parallel fashion, but those are handed off to GPUs. Because of the dramatic rise of GPU performance, more and more calculation stuff like that is being handed of the GPUs. Give all of the above there is no particularly good reason to try and push the numbers of CPU cores used."
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kprv22 | can you see refresh rate | I want to know if you can see refresh rate. I want to get a 27in 1080p 144hz monitor, but my dad says you can’t see refresh rate and its a marketing ploy done by the companies. Is he right or wrong? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He is wrong. Even to people who don't often play games the difference between 60Hz and 144Hz is noticeable, you get diminishing returns at higher refresh rates but you can still tell the difference up above 200Hz. Your eyes don't work like cameras, there isn't a fixed frame rate above which you can't see changes.",
"Refresh rate does make a difference in monitors. First off higher refresh rates generally go hand in hand with lower input latency, which can have a big effect on making a game feel more responsive. Secondly, more FPS means more information in getting displayed to your eyes during fast moments. A CSGO pro hitting an insane flick shot is a great example of this. Say the player takes 1/10th of a second to move their reticle to a target. And for ease say that target starts 10 centimeters away from their reticle on their screen. In that tenth of a second it takes them to aim and fire a high refresh rate will convey more information than a lower refresh rate. At 30 fps the screen would only refresh 3 times and the target would move in jumps of about 3.3 cm each time. At 120 fps the screen would update 12 times during that same shot, and the target would move in much smaller steps, less than 1 cm each time. This allows the player to better judge and adjust their aim mid shot. Your eye doesn’t really have a set “refresh rate.” When watching a movie or game your brain tries to smooth the frames together, but you can see how the higher refresh rate better simulates what it’s like seeing a fast moving object in the real world, things don’t normally move in steps...",
"Yes. You will see a different between 144 hz and 60 hz. The difference is big and feels wayy more smoother. But if you get a 60 hz monitor i don't think you'll mind that much"
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kpvs3k | how can old films be true 4K | I'm very confused how older films like 2001 a space odyssey can be true 4K but newer films like Endgame aren't. I understand a little bit eg shot in 8k and downgraded equals 4K but shot in 2k and upscaled is fake and the more cgi makes it more difficult to make it true 4K but I'm still confused. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Digital film and analogue film are not interchangeable in the sense that film stock does not have a ‘resolution’ - the clarity of the image is determined by the film size and quality used. 2001 was shot on 65mm Eastman film stock, so the ‘effective’ resolution (as far as the captured image clarity) is far higher than 4K can achieve. Film stock such as 2001 can be cleaned and digitally scanned at 4K quite happily, and in fact some movies have even been scanned at 8k resolution. Films shot on digital cameras do not have this luxury, as the quality of the image is set by the resolution used at the time. They can, at best, be interpolated to a higher resolution.",
"Old films were shot on film, not digitally. The old film reels had very high resolution depending a bit on the quality of the film used. Typically it would have been a bit better than 4K."
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kpy3e0 | How does sound travel during phone calls? How am I able to hear someone half way across the world but it sounds like I am sitting right next to them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sound travels in waves (usually through the air). When your vocal chords vibrate, it makes a pattern of waves in the air. If a speaker vibrates in that exact same pattern, it makes the same sound as your voice. The speaker vibrates either in or out. A microphone is essentially a tiny speaker. When your “voice waves” vibrate it, that in and out pattern is recorded as electronic instructions. Those instructions are sent to the other device over internet, cellular, radio, wire, etc. Once decoded, the device reproduces the in and out pattern on the speaker and you hear the same sound.",
"The sound doesn't. It's converted into an electrical signal that is transmitted through the phone system or the internet (depending on the type of call), then converted back into sounds on the other end.",
"A “transducer” turns pressure (sound waves) into voltage. Once you have a voltage signal there is a bunch of fun stuff you can do with it: turn it into 1’s and 0’s, broadcast it out on an AM tower, shoot it into space... etc"
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kq00mc | When streams lag, why does the resulting images then look the way the way they do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To save data, streams usually work by sending *keyframes* (full images) periodically and communicating the *changes* to those keyframes rather than sending a full image for every frame. What you're seeing is the changes without a full keyframe. The outline of the player changes rapidly because one side of it is the player, and the other side is the background, so that section's going to appear in most of the updates, but without a proper keyframe it's going to just show up as a distortion on whatever was originally behind it."
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kq1kt0 | How do CPUs deal with dead transistors? | A CPU has billions of transistors, of which any number of them could be broken or not working - how do they continue functioning without these transistors? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Welcome to the wonderful world of CPU binning. Have you ever wondered why Intel doesn't just make i7s? This is why. They try to make all i7s, say a 4 core CPU (not anymore but things have changed a little bit from this a 2 years ago because chiplets). Say a transistor in 1 core runs a little slow, its not broken but it can't run at full speed. Depending on this speed, they may take this down to a lower tier i7 or an i5. Say the transistor is completely broke. They will disable that core, disable the second worst core, and call it an i3 with 2 cores. I do want to note that the vast majority of the transistors aren't transistors in the cores, most of the CPU is cache. In which case they just disable the cache block with the faulty cache, and depending on how much cache they have to disable, they might also disable cores and call it an i3. In theory these cores disabled beside the faulty cores are perfectly good (though if disabling a working core, they will disable the worst working core), in fact back in the day you could re-enable them and use them, but just to keep a consistent and small set of cpu models they will keep a few of them. Do note that CPUs don't really have transistors dying with use usually. The only errors are usually in the manufacturing process. But overall they will only throw away CPUs that don't work completely. Everything else can still be sold.",
"One failed transistor, in certain parts of a CPU, could kill it dead. *However...* ...in a lot of places, processors have redundancy. If part of the memory cache fails, for instance, the processor can mark that section of the cache as unreliable and just work around it. If a 6-core system has a core go down, I'll bet it would reconfigure itself to 5- or 4-core operation and carry on. Not sure it could do that on the fly, that would be super impressive, but it seems possible. Processors have a lot of ways to check themselves, like attaching parity bits to data and sending 'acknowledge' messages when they receive signals. If a part fails, often the error will be noticed and the system will have a way to work around it. Like any error, if you catch it immediately and don't panic and have other resources, there's probably a way to carry on. As a chip manufacturer, you don't want your chips to have a reputation for dying all the time, so you'd want to design resilient CPUs that can fight through it when they have a problem.",
"The other comments in this thread right now provide macro answers, but in terms of physically masking out an actual integrated circuit; typically to provide redundancy and performance in certain areas of a chip, multiple transistors will be used instead of one. It may also be the case (depending on the process used and the physical implementation of transistors on the device) that hybrid transistors are created with, for example, a single gate but two channels. This provides redundancy by allowing one or more of the components not to work but still provide the correct logical function, perhaps with slightly lower performance (for example, if one redundant transistor in a logic gate doesn't work, the output drive strength may not be as high, meaning it can't be driven at its highest clock frequency). Your central assumption is certainly correct, though, and designers think carefully and strategically about transistors not working and how functioning chips can still be yielded from imperfect wafers."
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kq1zdw | How cell phone connects to the tower. | Yes, I can't figure it how. I know that the tower has a big powerful antenna that can send signals to long distances and cell phones can pick them. But how does a cell phone connects back to the tower to transmit data over long-range without that powerful transmitter? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The tower also has a very sensitive receiver. That's the main gist of it. You don't need much RF power if you can \"see\" what you are taking to, which is why the cell towers are very tall, so low power is totally fine since the signal doesn't need to go far.",
"There are a few steps. It connects in the same way all wireless things communicate: Radio Frequency waves. A cell phone has enough power to reach a cell tower about 45 miles away. However, because the towers use triangulation to determine what the best path available is, you need to be much closer for the timing to work correctly. The phone sends it's MAC, an address native to it's hardware. It also sends it's destination and the message. This allows the tower's computer to route the traffic effectively. Once it's at the tower, the tower can determine the best path to send the message throughout it's network, not unlike your home router does. If you have any other follow up questions, feel free to ask. I left the answer vague because the question was a little vague.",
"Cell towers not only have very powerful *transmitters* but also very sensitive *receivers*. Since cell phones send out such a weak signal, the towers compensate by using a high powered receiver. Like a big antenna receiving weak signals from a Mars rover. Radio waves travel at light speed for a long way and these antennas are crazy good at picking them up. Keep in mind this is bleeding edge radio frequency technology and the big companies don’t like sharing their methods."
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kq921s | How do we improve the tech of batteries? What is the difference between battery produced decades ago vs present vs future? | SmartPhone batteries from the last 10 years have progressed quite significantly, 4000mAh or more is now thr standard for many high end phones Ultimately we want batteries to store as much energy as possible, near perfect efficiency, as small as possible, as cheap and commercially available as possible. . How do we improve this? What changed in the past, what development is needed to gear up the batteries to the next level in the future? . Additional question : what about electric cars? Seems like tesla has been progressing quite a bit recently | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The main improvement of modern batteries is power density. The more power we can get from less mass the better. One of the new major limitations on batteries we have is cooling large batteries. We can make huge or super dense battery packs but we won’t be able to cool them efficiently. Electric car batteries are as complicated as combustion motors, they have huge cooling requirements, they’re heavy and they have a couple computers working together to tell them what to do. A lot of the improvements in the past were based on cooling and weight reduction of supportive electronics such as thermocouples(to measure temperature of battery cells) and electronic control modules. Reducing the mass of the battery pack without a loss of power is of course an improvement in power density.",
"The capacity improvement of cellphone battery is in large part simply because they are larger. Larger screens and higher performance and difference in usage have resulted that the average user requires more power have resulted in larger batteries used. 2000mAh common in the past and 4000mAh today so twice the capacity. The capacity for a Li-ion battery if the same size and weight have not increased by 100% in a decade so batteries are heavier today. If you make the cellphone larger and heavier you can increase the battery capacity. You can make a phone with 50 000mAh battery today and 10 years ago but it the size would result in the most useful not purchasing it. So batteries have gotten better because of better chemistry but the main change that you put larger and heavier batteries in the phones. You save weight and space by not having them removable. The electronic is also smaller."
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kqb9er | How do they fill water towers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A water pump. Most industrial/commercial pumps use a whirly thing to make water spin and go to the sides. They redirect the sides motions in the direction they want the water to go. The reason they have a water tower is that they can have the pump running all the time. When not a whole lot of people are using the water (like at night), the extra water it can pump goes in the tower. When more water is being used than the pump can pump, the water comes from the tower (which is full because it was pumping while nobody was using it)",
"They pump water into the tower. But the key thing is that water towers are not to store water. They are to provide water pressure. The normal water used by an area does not go through the tower. But the water in the tower is connected to the water system. With fluids, the pressure is the same everywhere in the system. So gravity pulling on the water in the tower creates pressure that pressurizes the entire water system. Water can be drawn from the tower if demand is temporarily high, such as when fighting a fire or if the power goes out and the pumps do not work. But storing water is a secondary benefit of the towers.",
"With pumps. They pump the water up into the tower when the level starts to drop. This lets the system provide constant pressure, while the pump only turns off-and-on at whatever speed it's more efficient."
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kqcclq | What's the difference between source code and the code you can find in the progam/files? | been seeing a lot of source code leaks lately and i don't really get it | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Source code is made to be readable by humans, while the data in a typical executable (what you mean by 'program') is made to be readable by a computer's processor. For example, I might write something like this in source code: int x = 14; But in fact, this human-readable instruction requires quite a bit of extra work behind the scenes. The exact work depends on the language, but one example might be: allocate space for an integer and store an address to that space store the value 00000000000000000000000000001110 [i.e., '14' written in binary] to the address from the previous step add x to the list of currently used variables But even this is human readable. In an executable, \"allocate space\" would be identified by some numeric code (say, 1010111101101), \"store an address\" would be identified by another one (say, 0011111001000), \"store this value to this address\" by another (say, 0001000101110), and so on. So in an executable, this would read as something like: 1010111101101[some location to store the address goes here]0011111001000000100010111000000000000000000000000000001110[the location from before goes here] Which is obviously not very useful to a human eye!",
"Hello World in C: #include < stdio.h > int main() { printf(\"Hello, World!\"); return 0; } The very same, compiled and hex dumped (had to snip out some from the middle to fit in a comment): 0000000 457f 464c 0102 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000010 0003 003e 0001 0000 1060 0000 0000 0000 0000020 0040 0000 0000 0000 3978 0000 0000 0000 0000030 0000 0000 0040 0038 000d 0040 001f 001e 0000040 0006 0000 0004 0000 0040 0000 0000 0000 0000050 0040 0000 0000 0000 0040 0000 0000 0000 0000060 02d8 0000 0000 0000 02d8 0000 0000 0000 0000070 0008 0000 0000 0000 0003 0000 0004 0000 0000080 0318 0000 0000 0000 0318 0000 0000 0000 ... 0003650 0000 0000 0000 0000 6300 7472 7473 6675 0003660 2e66 0063 6564 6572 6967 7473 7265 745f 0003670 5f6d 6c63 6e6f 7365 5f00 645f 5f6f 6c67 0003680 626f 6c61 645f 6f74 7372 615f 7875 6300 0003690 6d6f 6c70 7465 6465 382e 3630 0030 5f5f 00036a0 6f64 675f 6f6c 6162 5f6c 7464 726f 5f73 00036b0 7561 5f78 6966 696e 615f 7272 7961 655f 00036c0 746e 7972 6600 6172 656d 645f 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0000 0000 4010 0000 0000 0000 0004010 3010 0000 0000 0000 0008 0000 0000 0000 0004020 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0004030 0000 0000 0000 0000 0111 0000 0001 0000 0004040 0030 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0004050 3010 0000 0000 0000 002a 0000 0000 0000 0004060 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0004070 0001 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0002 0000 0004080 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0004090 3040 0000 0000 0000 0618 0000 0000 0000 00040a0 001d 0000 002e 0000 0008 0000 0000 0000 00040b0 0018 0000 0000 0000 0009 0000 0003 0000 00040c0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 00040d0 3658 0000 0000 0000 0202 0000 0000 0000 00040e0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 00040f0 0000 0000 0000 0000 0011 0000 0003 0000 0004100 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0004110 385a 0000 0000 0000 011a 0000 0000 0000 0004120 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 * 0004138 As you can see, one of these is a little easier to understand and work with.",
"Source code is the recipe. The program you have on your computer is the cake. Though the cake does its job just perfectly, if you want to find out how it was made, you need the source code. And you can't unbake the cake (at least, not without spending so much effort that you could just bake another cake all of your own, from scratch). The recipe tells you how to make the cake. So if you have the recipe, you can make as many cakes as you like, and even change the cake to do what you want. If you only have the cake... then you only have the cake. You can't change it, and you won't know how it was made. Thus the source code is far more useful, valuable and protected by the companies than the cakes that they sell to you. It's like someone finding out the recipe for Coca Cola and telling the world. Now everyone could, in theory, make their own Coca Cola that tastes just like the real thing. Worse, though, is that the recipe will reveal other secrets about the program that you may not want exposed - security vulnerabilities, hidden codes, patented methods of doing things, trade secrets, etc. (And in this example, the \"oven\" is called a compiler, it's a program that turns source code into a program that will run on your computer)",
"Computer programs are a bunch of instructions written in binary. It's nearly impossible for humans to read/understand binary so we write programs in another language (C++, Assembly, Basic, etc) and use another program, called a compiler, to translate our instructions to binary. Source code is the original file written where humans can still read it, included comments/notes in the code, named variables, and all the logic spelled out. Your local programs are only the binary translation. This can be dangerous to have source code leaked because its easier for hackers to find holes in the security when they can see exactly how the system works.",
"Source code is a recipe. The stuff that's on your computer is like a cookie. Sure, at some level, with sufficient skills and equipment, you can kind of deduce what the ingredients were, but only sortof. You'll never get the actual recipe back out again.",
"Software is very complicated cake with various layers, toppings, sprinkles and sides. If you're given the cake, it's delicious right? But you can't make it yourself because you don't know what the ingredients are or how it was cooked, you could modify it a little bit, but ultimately you're just changing the existing cake slightly eg: adding your own chocolate sauce for example (akin to installing software modifications) - you could also take great pains to recreate the cake yourself by tasting bits of it and approximating them yourself, it'll be more or less the same, but not quite. That cakes source code is it's ingredients list and method of cooking with detailed instructions, times etc, the comments within the source code itself are the pictures within the cookbook.",
"The program is a baked cake, the source code is the recipe/ingredients. Can you tell what went into a cake by examining it or tasting it? Kind of, but you'll never really be exact and a lot of it will just be guessing. Reproducing the cake from only having the finished product is nearly impossible if it's sufficiently complex, same with software."
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kqcnxi | How does a diffuser work? | How does an (aroma) diffuser work? How does it create mist? And how is cold "steam" possible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Loooots of shaking on a liiiitle circle plate make the water break up so fast it turns it into a mist. Scented oils in the water break up as well and float around with those tiny water drops."
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kqf4hj | What is cas latency? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"CAS Latency (CL) stands for Column Address Strobe. This is the number of clock cycles that pass from when an instruction is given for a particular column and the moment the data is available. In general the lower the CAS latency the better within a given memory technology (DDR, DDR2 or DDR3). URL_0",
"Imagine a conveyor belt that goes from the processor to the memory (the memory bus). The belt is evenly partitioned into spaces (cycles) to hold data coming to or leaving from memory to travel to the processor. Each stick of memory is like a librarian with columns of data behind them that accepts, stores and retrieves data being sent or requested by the processor. The librarian (memory stick's controller) cannot process every request immediately because the columns of data are pretty long and can only be read so fast. So, because of this constraint, the librarian (memory stick) can only fill a certain number of those spaces (cycles) on the conveyor belt (memory bus) at a time. CAS latency is essentially the number of cycles on the conveyor belt (memory bus) that goes unused because the memory stick could not fill them fast enough. The lower the number, the more efficiently your memory bus is being used by the memory sticks and the faster memory operations are completed."
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kqfegv | Why is it bad too sit close to a TV or PC while VR headsets are safe to sit centimeters from your eyes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"TVs were dangerous when they had Cathode Ray Tubes that were shooting high-power electrons at you and relying on the lead in the front glass to stop and resulting X-rays before they fried your brain. That's not how they work anymore. You might get eyestrain from focusing close for long periods, but that's a risk reading a book for a long time. VR headsets have lenses so they focus at distance, even though they are very close to your eyes, the lens makes the image appear at distance. You need this eye relief, hold your phone on the bridge of your nose and you won't be able to focus on it at all (unless you are nearsighted).",
"* The problem with sitting too close is eye strain. * TVs and PC monitors are designed to be best viewed at a certain distance. * If we sit closer our eyes are constantly shifting and re-adjusting focus as we look at different parts of the screen. * With VR everything is presented in the same area of our vision. We aren't shifting our eyes or re-focusing to look at different parts of the screen, rather we are just moving our heads."
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kqhd5f | How is it that a caller/telemarketer can call me, but if I try to call back, it doesn’t even ring and the line automatically disconnects? | I’m probably not describing this very well, but basically I get a lot of calls from unknown numbers and whenever I try to call them back, 99% of the time I don’t even get a dial tone— just a series of loud beeps and then the call suddenly ends. It just doesn’t make sense to me that someone can contact me from what appears to be a working phone number, but somehow it’s impossible for me to even redial that same number mere seconds later. Why does this happen? How is it possible that a number works for making calls but is unable to receive them? Hope I’m making sense here, if someone could please enlighten me that’d be great because this is literally breaking my brain for some reason lol | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You're likely not calling their real number, as they've spoofed the number that shows up on your caller ID. The new pattern by these telemarketers and fraudsters is to replace the calling number to something that you'd be more likely to answer from, like a similar number in your area.",
"The phone system does not track where a call is coming from. A phone exchange is just looking at where the call is going to when deciding where to route it. It does not even care if the call is coming from a direct line or from another phone exchange. Caller ID is an afterthought and is never actually checked. A lot of business phone systems even requires you to enter the Caller ID yourself when you set it up. This may be needed if for example you want people returning your call to reach the reception instead of being able to call directly to the desk phone of the employee. Telemarketers, both legal and illegal ones, might not want you to call back at all. So they program their phones to use a number that looks real but that they know is not connected to anyone. They are not actually using that number to call out with, in fact they do not need a phone number to call out at all. It is even common among illegal phone scammers to use the Caller ID to harass people that were cruel to them when they called."
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kqj4o5 | Why do internal search engines often do not work as you expect them to work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because building search algorithms that work *as you expect* is extremely hard. Google works so well because they invested unfathomable amounts of money into the development of their most-known core product, the search engine. Now just compare it to the next competitor, Microsoft's Bing search. While developing that one also took lots and lots of money, its results are arguably worse than Google's, at least in public opinion. So we easily see that, while the amount of spent money on development is still huge in absolute numbers, search quality decreases faster than the money involved. Fast forward now, skip a lot of search engines in between until you're looking at your internal search engine, that probably isn't a core product of a multi-billion dollar company. It's probably just a by-product the developers threw onto a specific product to make it look more complete. There cannot be remotely enough \"brain power\" in there to provide anything more than exact text search with some fuzzy tolerances in matches maybe. In other words, it lacks any *semantic abilities*. But those semantic features are what you *expect* from a search engine and they are simply not available. // edit: To provide an example for semantic abilities, based on the example from a post further down here: If you type \"Star Wars\", then returning \"star\" and \"wars\" is dumb. Returning \"Star Wars\"-matches is better, but still not good. If the engine knows that, for example, \"Rogue One\" is somehow connected to \"Star Wars\" even though they do not share more letters than the \"r\", then you have an algorithm that is semantically useful.",
"Like many applications, a search engine needs programming help to operate more efficiently. Search relies on programs that help to index the results, kind of like a filing system... so, for example, if there are a lot of documents that contain both “peach” and “pie”, but only a few that have “apple” and “pie”, a good search could list peach pie documents first, even though Apple would come up first alphabetically. You may have heard of Google’s “spiders”: these are programs that crawl the web 24/7 to find relationships that help make their search engines more accurate to what you’re actually looking for. Usually internal systems are implemented “out of the box”, as they come from the developer. There isn’t a lot of tuning or customization, because it’s expensive and it’s not a revenue-creating activity.",
"I work for an education department...it’s easier to search for a document through Google then to use the internal search engine. I have further defined the problem."
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kqndo3 | How do Zero Click exploits work or manage to execute the code | How do these exploits manage to force the device to run the code? Can you really just send TCP or even SMS packets/messages with the messages in a way the device will run? I am very intrigued and worried about these attacks. Apple says they patch them but there are constantly new ones | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I mean data recieved at some point gets redirected to some application. Those applications do something when they recieve the data. Sometimes the application in question is the OS or your Messaging program or your 18+ XXX Minecraft server. A clever and patient person who understands how the target application handles incoming data can format said data to cause unintended behavior on your device. That's what they call an exploit or a security hole. None of that inherently requires the user to click anything. Of course most systems don't allow themselves to do anything crazy, or are hemmed in by security from their environment. The easiest way to bypass these safeguards is to get the dumbest, most gullible, and most needless part of a system (the user) to do something like click a link or run a program."
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kqp1av | How do people build computer components such as transistors that are nanometers in size and make billions of them in tiny chips to hold and read data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Photolithography. (Literally: writing with light on stone). You print out the patterns you want on some glass then you shine light through the glass and through some lenses until you have a teeny tiny image projected like a projector onto some silicon with some special chemicals on it. Then you develop it all like a photograph where you use some acid that will eat away anywhere the light didn't touch and keep anywhere the light did touch. In the modern day it gets more complicated because everything is so small and you end up exploding single drops of tin in a vacuum to make pure enough light and having to put the lenses in ultrapure water so you can use weird optical effects of liquid to duplicate patterns that are too small to project directly but the general idea is just shine a tiny image on some light sensitive film then remove all the material that light didn't hit.",
"The process is called lithography. They make an image of what they want, layer by layer. Then they use lenses to project a much smaller version of the pattern on a wafer. They build it layer by layer, coating the material with a photo reactive substance. After the substance reacts to the imagethey etch off the part of the layer that's not protected."
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kqr0z0 | Why do techs always 1st ask if we restarted the router? Why does that the most common fix to the issue? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A router is essentially a small computer, and like all computers, may develop issues after running for a while without a restart--maybe some application on it has a memory leak and starts running slow, or memory fragmentation due to constantly allocating and deallocating memory blocks is a problem, and so on. Restarting sets it up clean and thus tends to fix issues. This is also why the tech asks you to do that first, because it's simple and will solve a lot of problems.",
"The classic I.T. Crowd \"Switch it off and back on again\" is a genuine quick solution to a lot of I.T. problems because it forces the device to \"rediscover\" the correct settings, typically the techs are reading off a script and often they cannot diverge from the script because they'd get sacked. For routers, the firmware in them automatically creates routing data tables and errors creep in to data tables causing the router to do the wrong thing, so restarting it erases the table and forces it to rebuild the data with no (or more likely fewer) errors. Edit: clarity",
"A lot of the answers here are either inaccurate, don't actually attempt to explain, or are great answers but a little simple. u/d2factotum and u/ADelicateOrange gave very good answers. (Which isn't meant to say that other people didn't also give great answers.) Here's an in-the-weeds answer if that's what you're interested in. Routers work by using *Routing Protocols.* These sets of formal instructions determine how the router sends packets of data across the network. Some of those protocols send out packets to all other devices and ask for a response. They use the time (in milliseconds) to determine the distance. If you're trying to send a message from one place to another, it'll choose the fastest route. However, sometimes the fastest route is also going to see the most traffic. This means that you'd be clogging up the main path, which makes traffic slower for everyone. So engineers create newer and better routing protocols that can handle different situations. They combine things like response time (what I described above), number of hops (amount of devices in between), and they also communicate the speed available of the link. Using all of this data, you're able to create a really good map of how to send traffic around a network quickly. Howwwwwever, eventually things change in a network. New devices are added, networks grow, links change. So what was correct last week might not be the fastest option this week. Some routers are able to handle these changes as well, but those are more expensive than most standard user routers. Like u/d2factotum mentioned, computers must have memory to do *anything.* In case you're not familiar, memory and storage are different. Storage is your hard drive, and memory is Random Access Memory, or RAM. Anyway, computers can use storage to supplement memory for faster processing. If the routing tables fill up storage, then this can also slow the ability of the router to process data. This isn't the same thing u/d2factotum said, so his explanation is correct but different. When you restart the router, like many others have said, it clears these tables and means that it can find the most correct paths. Finally, network storms happen in misconfigured networks. You'll probably never experience one in your home network because home networks are small. But a network storm is (very) basically a situation in which routers and computers create loops when trying to find new devices. All of a sudden the network is at max capacity much like a traffic jam on a highway. This is a critical failure and by restarting the router, all traffic stops as well. This gives the whole network an opportunity to restart from a baseline. Restarting the router verifies that this issue isn't the cause of a problem and much like power, allows the tech to move on to the more complex issues. There's no reason to replace an engine of a car if the user just failed to put gas in the car. Start with the easy and the simple because easy problems happen more often than hard ones.",
"Computers work in pretty linear ways. It works with building lines of code upon itself. When it fails it doesn't really understand how to fix itself. So, the easiest way to fix it is to have the system restart to allow the technology to start back at square 1 of the current build state, and see if it can actually do the code. 9/10 it will be able to. Sometimes things just break like those awkward times we trip on nothing.",
"Computers in general, including routers, have memory. As the router works, it fills and empties parts of that memory. Over time, some memory may be written to, however the program doesn't refer it anymore, which looses memory. Restarting the device clears this memory. Its also possible some bug in the program occurred that wasn't accounted for, and this causes some glitch that can't fix itself. This can possibly freeze the program, or it can cause slow downs. A restart will get rid of these glitches by resetting the program's state. Its something that can fix most of the temporary issues, and has very little risk to cause further damage."
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kqs1kp | why do newer smartphones reboot after changing a SIM card? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Older phones you had to shut down before messing with the Sim, so the reboot was hidden. iPhones don't need to reboot because they don't utilise some sim card features like contacts storage."
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kqs73c | How does compressing a file work? As in how can you can a specific amount of data in the form of bits take less bits to have the exact file? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Say I give you the following sequence of numbers, it's twenty digits long: `11111111444442222222` The sequence consists of eight `1`'s, followed by five `4`'s, followed by seven `2`'s. So you could code the same information in a different way using only six digits: `815472`. That's how compression works. (Compression isn't magic. A compression program only gives you a shorter output if there's some kind of pattern in the input that the program can \"look for\" and then code in a shorter way.)",
"It's because real files have lots of repeated patterns. Text files are usually very highly compressible because language naturally has lots of repeated phrases and words. A compression algorithm can then build a little table of the longer and more frequent patterns matching them to small codes. There is some overhead with storing the table of patterns and with identifying data that isn't in the table but this amount of extra data added will usually be less than the space saved.",
"Both the sender/encoder and the reciever/decoder can agree on some form of file type or encryption scheme, so that basically some of the information is already known by both parties. Say I wanted to write a piece of music, and I had to write every note plus the time delay until the next note. But if you and I both agreed that all notes are .5 seconds apart, then I would no longer need to write the delays, only the notes, so the file would be smaller. Or if I was sending you a book, but we both agreed that the letter r by itself represented the word are. Then I could send you a file with slightly fewer letters without losing meaning.",
"Lets say we want to compress the message \"i like apples\" We could say that the number 1 means 'i', the number 2 mean 'like', the number 3 means 'apples', and the number 0 means ' ' (a space). So then the message would be, '10203' instead. This message would take 5 characters instead of 13 characters to encode. But there's a problem! This scheme would only work with messages that use 'i' 'like' 'apples' and ' '. You can't encode a message like 'i like bananas' with this. You should be able to see that if our scheme is too specific, it isn't usable for general cases. And if its too general, then you would just be mapping letters to numbers 1 to 1, so it wouldn't reduce the size anymore. With these two ideas, there exists some specialized optimal encoding in between these two extremes that is general enough and specific enough to reduce the size of our file/message. This is also why you can't really compress a message multiple times. It reaches some optimal state of encoding data that can't really be reduced anymore or else you lose information in the message.",
"In short, the trick is: make short words for things you tell often, make long words for things you tell seldom. Take, for example, English text. Letter \"E\" takes up 12.02% of all letters in the text, while letter \"Z\" - only 0.07%. But with standard ASCII encoding both will take 8 bits. We can do much better if we give letter \"E\" short 3 bit code, and letter \"Z\" can have 11 bit code. Yes, letter Z became longer, but it so rare, that it will have minuscule effect. On the other hand, we save a lot of space on letter E, because it is so common. If we do that for every letter in the alphabet, we can achieve 4,2 bits per letter on average (instead of 8 bits per letter). We can do even better if we encode pairs of letters. For example, letter H is pretty rare on its own, but it is much more common after T. We can go even further and encode entire words or short phrases! All that will make the result even shorter. That's the gist of how compressors works: they calculate statistics of how bytes is used and encode them in \"short often, long seldom\" fashion. Many also have some kind of \"dictionary of common words\" to encode repeating sequences shorter."
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kqy3u9 | What is the clicking/creaking noise that a TV makes some time after it has been switched off? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many electronics get warm while running. Thermal expansion causes the cabinet to increase in size. When you turn it off and it starts to cool the movement in the cabinet pieces is what’s making the creaking noises you hear. You can often hear similar noises from your heating and air conditioning system.",
"Some TVs contain relays, which are mechanical switches that turn things on or off inside the TV. You could be hearing the TV turning the relay off and going into low power mode after a period of sitting idle. The Sony TV at my parent's house randomly clicks throughout the day."
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kqz9pq | how do they know what IP address sent an email? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"* Emails have a lot of extra information that most email programs and services don't show you because most of the time you don't care. * This is called \"header\" information and it contains the IP address of the server that sent the email. * It also contains a lot of other stuff too most of which can be very confusing if you don't know what it means.",
"The sender had to make a connection to the receiver. That process will always provide the receiver the IP address of the sender. Thus, the receiving emails server can log what IP address sent a particular email. The sender can use a proxy of some kind to hide their real IP address though."
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kr6mf3 | What is the difference between an intel i5 and an intel i7? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are 4 classes of \"i\" chips, the i3, i5, i7, and i9. the main difference is the amount of \"threads\" and \"cores\" a Core is the brain part of the CPU. a thread is like the two halves of a the brain. when the CPU is told to do a thing, that thing is split into two \"threads\" one going down one half of the Core, and the other going down the other half of the core. an i7 has more cores, usually 4 (depending on the specific i7) and each core can split a thing into two halves. & #x200B; Therefore the higher number, the more the CPU can do at once, and faster the computer. USUALLY. There are things called Clock speeds that come into play, the clock speed is how fast the Cores can do the thing they are told to do. & #x200B; Think of it like a river. 1 river = 1 core. Just like a river can be split up, a CPU can be split up. The clock speed is how fast the river is flowing. A fast moving stream moves a lot of water, but a wider river moves more, even if its going slower. & #x200B; Hope that makes sense. =D",
"Surprised nobody has mentioned binning yet! Ideally, every processor Intel manufactures would be an i9, but inevitably there are defects in the manufacturing process. When a processor falls short of the quality standard required to be an i9, certain features are turned off (such as Hypertheading) and cores disabled and it is tested to see if it passes for an i7, if not the process repeats and it is tested to see if is an i5, then an i3.",
"The number and quality of the computing cores. An i5 has 4 cores and an i7 usually has 6 cores that can run at a higher clock speed (do more operations per second).",
"For a consumer: **i3**: \"General consumer level / mid-level\". Lowest priced, and for general computer uses. This is actually the \"right price to power\" option for most users. It being the lowest in the i-series is a bit misleading that these are still very powerful and are actually the mid level chip. **i5**: \"Mid-high level\" For general users and power users who are doing a bit more intensive tasks than your average user, such as gaming, complex business functions, or light video editing. Frankly, if you have a question if you may do tasks like this, its often a good idea to get an i5 over an i3, and prices usually aren't that much more. If you plan to play new games, at high settings you should get at least an i5. **i7**: \"Enthusiast level\" For a smaller segment of users that need extremely high end performance in specialized task or very high-end performance gaming. If you don't know what these tasks would be, thats a clear indication that an i7 isn't for you."
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krb8l0 | Why do 4k videos look better than 1080p on a 1080p screen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"If you're talking about online streaming videos (e.g. Youtube), the resolution isn't just the resolution but also affects the compression level. The 1080p version isn't a perfect detail 1080p video, it's compressed which adds some blurriness and stuff (but makes the file smaller). The 4k version is also compressed which adds some blurriness and stuff. The 4k version has more detail in it than the 1080p one, even after the compression does its thing. And a lot of the detail is big enough to see even after you shrink it.",
"It's due to the level of compression and higher bit rate. I always watch in 1440p when it's available on a YouTube video even though I own a 1080p IPS monitor."
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krc1xi | Why are laptop batteries so much more durable than phone batteries? | I get that the battery is probably like 10 times bigger, but we all hear the "Don't use your phone while it's charging that'll ruin it!" But I've never once in my life heard the "Your laptop's battery will be ruined if you use it while its charging!" Please keep in mind I don't know much about technology so bear with me | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It used to be the case. Battery memory was a big thing back in days of yore. Even in laptops. The materials are the parts that wear a little funny when you charge and discharge at the same time. Modern electronics, even phones, have more durable deep cycle batteries, and can withstand that behavior. That, coupled with smarter chargers that direct a portion of power to the device itself, on top of charging the battery, so this is prevented a second way."
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krcpl7 | how are VFX added to movies shot on film? | I'm not really sure how the shoot a movie on film then proceed to edit it / add visual effects and then release it. Digitally, for unprofessional people like me, we just take out the SD card, plug it into the computer, import the file into the software, do whatever then render it. When its shot on film, I don't get how they do all of that | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You scan the film, so that you have an image of each frame. Then you compute your VFX to line up with the pixels in the frames. Then you print your VFX onto film. Then you can use multi-frame printing to get film for the scene. Or you do the composition digitally and print new frames."
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krfikn | How are law enforcement agencies able to retrieve data off of a device or sim etc. that has been erased/deleted, yet we cannot retrieve our own lost data? Isn't the point of erasing something to completely erase it... | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You actually can recover it. You just need the right tools. It's the digital equivalent of the pencil trick, looking for fragments of data that may not have fully gone away, references in other files, etc that may help you rebuild a file partially. The way to fully make it gone is to write over it, with new files.",
"Deleting something doesn’t remove it from your hard drive. It marks the space that it takes up “free space” and when something else needs the space it will overwrite it. It isn’t until that point where it’s over written that it’s actually gone. As for retrieving your own lost data, you absolutely can if you have the right programs and know what you’re doing.",
"So, here's the best way I can explain this. When you \"delete\" something, off of your device, it's not actually being deleted. A programming function on your device is just choosing to ignore that particular data. If you happen to use that space up, however, it will be overwritten. Typically, devices don't have built in software to allow access to \"deleted\" files, but you can actually just download stuff like that. There's a ton of recovery software that exists out there. The main answer to your question, then, is that law enforcement agencies have access to very good recovery software. The recovery aspect of their software is the same as you yourself could get, but their software often has elements that can attempt to bypass security. That's why a lot of device manufacturers advertise their encryption technology, as it can help users feel more secure by attempting to block unwanted prying into your devices hidden files.",
"As others have said, you don't erase it normally, it's just marked as free space to write in. To completely erase it you need to write over it various times, shred the hard drive and then melt it"
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krjbx1 | what is the reason for REMASTERING old songs? Is that due to the newer and more advanced sound systems? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What has been already said, but exactly the reason why you think it woukd happen. Older songs that are extremely popular compared to ones that arent will get more album and singles sales. With the new advancements, of course the music industry is going to make a remastered version, so it can sound better or at least more crisp and clear to generations that aren't used to the old sound. The incentive is of course money, but you don't see just anyone remastering songs. Now that we have the technology to do it, of course it is going to be done. People will listen to a clearer sounding track or pay for a service or buy the song for it to add to songs that are newer. If the track was kept the same, then people might not listen to it as much as a newer song. TLDR making use of new technology as well as trying to keep the business going"
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krk6oq | ;How can http transfer video, audio and files not containing hypertext when it is a 'Hyper Text Tranfer protocol' | The wikipedia for http says ``` The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. ``` I searched the word hypermedia and it seems to be the extension of hypertext to include video, audio etc. But nowhere in the wikipedia it says that HTTP transfers hypermedia instead of hypertext. It just says that it is used for hypermedia information systems. So shouldn't the full form of HTTP be Hypermedia Transfer Protocol ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Are you asking how it actually works to transfer audio and video over http, or are you asking why the name is what it is?",
"Because while it's original purpose was to only transfer text, it was extended to support other formats, but the name remained. We also use HTTP today for things like web services which are far from hypertext. As for how it actually works, the server's response includes a \"Content-Type\" header which says what kind of content it is serving, such as \"text/html\", \"image/jpg\", \"audio/mpeg\" and \"video/mp4\". It also includes another header \"Content-Length\" which tells the client exactly how long the response is. Alternatively the response can be in \"chunks\" where the server sends pieces of the file, with each piece preceded by its length."
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krmyyi | how do archaeology digging not damage artefacts or fossils? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Initial discoveries can be made by normal construction activity that obviously is done with excavators and shovels, but when archaeologists are digging in an area known to contain artifacts they do their preparation. Dirt layers build up over time, so when something is uncovered say 3m underground they will look at the layers above in the area already exposed to see what was going on during those periods and if it is of interest. After checking a number of spots they gain confidence that indeed the area of interest is covered by 2m of overburden and they can use equipment to remove that material more efficiently than the hand trowels, brushes, and fine picks used for the delicate work.",
"Scientists use ground penetrating radar and sonar as well as geology to get estimates on how deep the site is. They then go through all the material with a fine tooth comb as they dig and switch to very delicate methods once close to where the artifacts should be.",
"There are many techniques that can be loosely categorized as invasive (using an excavator), minimally invasive (manually troweling) and noninvasive (ground penetrating radar). The selection of excavation technique depends on the initial information gathered about the site locality and what is feasible for the project in terms of money and time. Different archaeologists in different areas of the world have different excavation preferences based on their research topic and geographical area. Mistakes unfortunately do happen, but when the research is important to society, it is unusual that the artifacts are not handled with care.",
"There are layers in the ground called strata, and we usually know which one we're looking for. So if you're looking for a load of burials, and there are 3 strata, you know that layer 1 is soil, layer 2 is pebbles, and layer 3 is clay. The people lived before the soil, so they lived on layer 2, but they dug the graves deep down so the holes for the people will be in layer 3, so you can remove all the soil and some of the rocks with a digger and then be really careful with the clay layer. Saying that, on a dig in Spain, the first hit with a pickaxe into the top layer shattered a burial urn, the head archaeologists response was just \"that's what glue is for!\". Once you find the right layer you do everything super slowly. So when I found the edges of a burial hole with my shovel, I dug with a tiny trowel and brush, and every inch or so was photographed and cataloged, so you couldn't do any damage. All of the dirt that was dug out was inspected and even tiny bone fragments were sorted and kept. Usually diggers are used to remove all the layers that people have already messed with. Farmland has been plowed to a certain depth, so you know everything up to a certain point has been disturbed anyway."
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krnah4 | Why do some apps stay open when you leave for 5 seconds but others take you back all the way to the starting screen? | Edit: Inspiration came from the Minecraft and Roblox app lol. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that apps are litte robots in your phone. They are all asleep in little bunk beds. When you launch an app, its robot wakes up and starts talking to you. When you switch to a new app, the old app’s robot now has nothing to do. On big phones, there could be room for two app robots to be awake at the same time. On small phones, there’s only enough room for one robot at a time, so the old robot goes back to its bunk bed and goes to sleep. Even on a big phone, the robot might get bored with no one to talk to and put itself to bed. When you launch the old app again, its robot wakes up, but it’s forgotten everything it was doing so it has to start all over from the beginning. But smart robot makers know this makes users sad! They give their robots a litte notebook, so when they go to sleep they can write down everything they were doing. That way, when they wake up, they can look at the notebook and remember just what to do to pick up where they left off. It is a little more trouble for the robot maker to teach the robot how to use a notebook, but it’s so much nicer for everyone if they do.",
"I don't know about iOS, only Android. The simplest case is when your phone has enough ram to work with that your previous app can stay open in the background. Basically what happens is that Android tries to manage your phone's resources (CPU, RAM, battery life etc.) as efficiently as possible. This means that sometimes it has to stop applications that are running in the background to make space for the app that is currently in focus. Also, Android provides the possibility for apps to not outright close, but to be put into a hibernated state. Think of it like freezing the application and saving it like you would save a file. When you open the app again, the app is defrosted and you can continue where you left off, giving the impression that the app was running in the background all along. In most cases having this hibernation in an application requires more work from the developers. If they decide not to support it, the app will just close, that is why it takes you back to the start screen. tl;dr: your phone might have enough ram to have multiple apps running in the background, or the closed app's state is saved to storage, which is loaded again once it comes back to focus",
"As an iOS developer I can tell you the reason for iOS with absolute certainty: apps which use the least memory are killed last by the OS. When your phone needs more memory, it asks every app to free some memory. Those that don't free enough when they're using a lot are terminated. As a result, some apps stay open indefinitely because they are hardly using any.",
"In short, this is called Tombstoning, or \"\"remember the apps last known state.\" The phones provide a means to tombstone (iOS, Android). However, it's up to each application developer to *actually write* the code to save, and restore, the state of the app. Leave a low rating for the app saying as such. Either you have a good developer, that does this or will listen to ratings. Or, the app dev doesn't give a frack and does whatever. It will show you the quality of the app you are using (and makes you wonder what else is wrong with the app).",
"It depends on whether or not the creator of the app programmed it. For security reasons, some apps have an automatic logout when the app goes to the background. Others might keep an open connection when it's pushed to the background so you can continue where you left.",
"As others explained, this is due to the app being in RAM but this memory is limited and unused apps are put to sleep or unloaded when not in use. I like to explain it as having an office with a desk and drawers for archival. The desk is your RAM: It's where you put documents or stuff you're currently working on. Having a bigger desk is like having more RAM, which means you can switch between various things at the same time. Sometimes you run out of space in your desk, either because it's small or you're working on too much stuff at the same time. So you (the operating system) need to store one or various documents in a drawer for later use. Obviously you'd want the least or oldest used document out of the way, while keeping in the desk the most recent stuff so you can keep working on it. This is why you can put some apps on the background for a little bit, like answering a message and coming back, but if you leave them in the background too long the app needs to reload everything it had: the app got sent to the drawer AKA \"put to sleep\", and getting a big document out of a drawer (loading the app's data which got unloaded) is time-consuming and slower then just having the document on the desk ready to go",
"Modern phones should not have this issue. They have enough RAM to cache whatever app you're using and should let you get back to where you were upon reopening it. The fault lies with manufacturers' intrusive \"battery optimization\" which kills background apps to save battery. On my Huawei phone you can't even turn it off, the option to do so doesn't do anything. URL_0 Here you can see the worst culprits of this horrible practice. Avoid these brands if you want a nice phone experience.",
"Because the product owners won't allow me time to address the technical debt and allow caching app level state on global re renders",
"YouTube: You were 4 seconds into this interesting video and switched apps...let me just refresh when you reopen. Also, you were two minutes into this other one but got distracted and 7 hours later when you open it up, I'm still paused! Seriously...it makes no sense.",
"When an app starts from scratch, it usually means the app lacks the ability to go to the background, meaning the app eats too much power or somehow uses too much resources to stay active. The Devs would have to do extra work to facilitate the background-ness of the app",
"Android has a custom memory management. It's not the same as Linux memory management, which also exists on the lower level of Android OS. The Android memory management is a set of memory rules. Privileged users (or manufacturers) can set these rules of how much memory can you use while the app is shown, the app is in background, the app is not really doing anything, etc. When the criteria are crossed, Android will close one of your apps. iOS and others may be different, but they need to have background process support, so it's likely that their ideas are not far different.",
"Android OS (and likely iOS too) will tell an application when various things are happening, like when the screen turns off, or the phone is turned sideways, or the users switches to another app, or when the user switches back to this app. The developer can write code to then do something when these triggers occur. Typically this would be used to save the current application state (like what screen you were on, what text you already entered into a text field, etc.), or to automatically pause a game, or to restore the state. If the application doesn't do these things then the developer is ignoring these triggers events coming from the OS. TL;dr it's a bad or lazy developer.",
"No clue about Android, but for iOS: When you switch apps, the previous app goes into a hibernation mode and most of the time if you switch back immediately, it will still be around and ready to wake up immediately right where you were. However if the system starts to run out of memory, it will start killing off hibernating apps. The rules that iOS uses are not straightforward or made public, but generally speaking apps that use less memory and are used more often get to stay alive longer while heavier apps and those that haven't been opened for a long time get killed right away. Beyond that, some apps will save their state before they enter the background and even if the app gets killed, will relaunch to the same spot when you reopen them, albeit with a bit of a delay. However, since phones have gotten more memory in recent years, fewer and fewer apps are bothering to do this since 9 times out of 10 (especially for employees who use the app regularly) the app is still in memory when it gets relaunched. Additionally, in recent years Apple has made some changes that cause apps to get killed more aggressively if they cross some undefined line in the sand. A lot of really great apps have had issues getting killed in the background for violating undocumented policies (like taking too long to download a file or not responding to an api correctly) and have just started to figure out how to avoid that."
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krs9la | Why does it seem like the last few 1 or 2 percent of a download, update, etc, take forever compared everything before it? Like if it takes 5 minutes for the first 98% the last 2% take 5 minutes alone! Why? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that you live in a tropical jungle and that you need a new bed, but the only shop is 2 km/1.2 miles away. Therefore, you send Bob, your friend, to get it. It is very easy to estimate how fast it would take Bob to go to the shop and come back, since you know how far it is, and how fast Bob walks. But, what if Bob met a lion or a buffalo blocking his path? He'd take longer to go and come back, but you wouldn't have a lot of ways of knowing what happened. Downloads work in the same way. Some downloaders estimate the time it'll take to get a file but then slow internet happens (Lion) or there's a lot of people downloading that file at that time (Buffalo) and it slows down the process. Even if the process bar is moving along, if it hasn't adjusted to such changes, then it'll move up until 99%, then stay there as it finishes up the download. Now take the same example of Bob from above. Obviously Bob cannot carry an entire bed with him by himself for that distance easily. But, he can take one leg, bring it back, go back for another, go back for the mattress and so on and so forth until you have all the pieces you need to make a bed. However, you'd still need to put the pieces together to have the complete bed. Same thing with downloads. They don't send the entire file, rather they send little bits and pieces (These are called packets) with instructions on how your computer/phone will put the pieces together. Downloads usually get assembled towards the end of the process, which also makes the last few steps longer than the rest of the process.",
"I've written programs with a progress bar. In the beginning you set the bar to zero and start your long-term activity. You check in to see how it's going and update the bar accordingly. This is really easy if counting from one to a million. Up the bar by 1% at every 10,000, and it'll be smooth through 100. But we don't necessarily know how fast something will download. You check the time so far and the amount of data you've downloaded so far, and you do the math on that to estimate how long it will be until it's done, then do the math again to see how far you need to nudge up the progress bar. Since download speeds often go up and down, this estimation isn't always that accurate. So you get near the end of your bar, 98%, and between your estimation algorithm and the fluctuation of download speeds, you didn't get it quite right. You don't want to make the bar go backwards since that will confuse people (\"How did I just un-download 5% of my file?\"). So your bar sits at 98% until the actual download catches up."
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krss9e | How/why do electronics work? Like in the simplest terms, a bunch of metals are mashed together. How the heck does that create a computer/smartphone with insane capabilities? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think of it like water through pipes forced by gravity and water pressure... As it travels through pipes, it can do work. Additionally, it can flip “switches” to change the flow. Using this principal, you can design logic gates and with those you can design adders and perform calculations using only water and pipes. Electrons traveling through circuitry can work the same way. URL_0",
"Digital electronics typically use CMOS logic, where they string together a bunch of [electrically-controlled switches]( URL_0 ) to do math and control other switches. For example, an AND gate (a type of this switch) will output a '1' (or high voltage) if both of the inputs are a 1. The output is then wired to another switch's input that will do something based on whether it's a 1 or a 0. You can string together various types of these switches to do more complicated math and move data around, since the data itself is also 1's and 0's. We've known how to use switches to do math for a long time even before computers were invented, but back then switches were all manual so it was slower than just doing math by hand. It wasn't until we developed faster electrically-controlled switches that computers were fast enough to do anything. Nowadays the switches take trillionths of a second to flip on or off, allowing us to do billions of mathematical operations in a single second."
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krup8e | What are JPEG artifacts and why do they happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Compression finds patterns in data and and tries to represent them in as little space as possible. JPEG is also a lossy compression algorithm which allows for data loss. What happens then is that the image is broken into blocks and if colors are similar enough, they are represented as a single color. When the image is rendered, these can appear as blocky sections usually apparent near gradients or line art, such as text. The higher the level of compression of a lossy algorithm, the more data loss, and the more pronounced the effect."
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ks08lv | How do sockets work? | If I have a fan plugged in to a socket and the socket’s switch is flipped on but the fan is not, is there still an electric current? And if the fan is switched on and put to a high speed would the electricity current be more than it would be on low speed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"you could imagine it like a water pipe. the wall socket is a tap and so is the switch on the fan. if it’s a two speed fan then the tap on the fan can open to let a small flow of water through or a larger amount. no water actually flows anywhere unless both taps are open. the current is the amount of water flowing."
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ks1y1v | What is a ROM header? | When I patch my videogame ROMs, sometimes they talk about something like "header" or "headerless"... I just bruteforce it tbh, if one patch doesn't work I just use the other one so, what Is a header? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So, in the computing world, a \"header\" is a block of data that comes before (at the **head** of) the actual desired data (being stored or transmitted) that basically provides information either necessary for the desired data (payload) to run, or information regarding the properties of the payload. It is a **supplement** to the payload. I found [this]( URL_0 ) comment on /r/nes explaining what a header precisely is in regards to your question. Basically, the header tells the emulator the size of the ROM, the region the game is in, what console it's for etc. So when a patch doesn't work because it is missing a header, it's because the emulator doesn't know the details about the ROM needed to run the game. I.e. the emulator saying: *Is this a NES game? GameCube? Wii? How big is it? I don't know, so I cant run it*"
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ks4zm1 | why copying a software project is called forking? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think of it as a \"fork in the road.\" When you make a copy, you can make changes that aren't in the original. Anyone else that makes a copy can do the same, so mapping out where each copy came from creates something like a family tree. You could call it \"branching\" instead of forking, but branching already has a meaning in programming, so we call it forking to avoid confusion."
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ks844n | How can i create my own ".com"? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There's too much for me to explain. Here's a page that should tell you what you need to know. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
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ks9rl2 | how does the tinted car mirror work when you fold it at a different angle | As title explains, some car mirrors can fold down a tiny bit giving you a more dimm or tinted perspective, how does this work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here’s what my driver’s ed teacher told us.... When the mirror is angled normally, the light seen by the driver is coming from the mirror’s silver backing. At the same time, a tiny amount of light is also reflecting off of the front face of the glass but at a different enough angle so that this light hits either the chest or the ceiling. When the mirror is angled away from normal, the light coming from the silver backing is now hitting the chest or ceiling, and the tiny amount of light coming from the front face of the glass is now hitting the drivers eyes. The front glass’s light is only about 1/20th the power of the silver backing’s light.",
"There are two reflective surfaces. The surface of the glass (glare), and the mirrored surface on the other side of the glass. The glass is wedge-shaped, so if one of these surfaces reflects out the back of the car, the other either reflects the roof or the back seat. During normal driving, you have it angled so that the fully mirrored side of the glass reflects out of the back of the car. This gives you full visibility out the back, with a very dim image of the car's back seat overlaid on top. If the light hits just right, you can see this image. When you flip the mirror, it is probably dark outside, and even darker *inside* the car. Even if the image from the 'stronger' mirrored surface is much stronger, it is still very dim because the roof of the car is very dark. However, the glare from the glass produces a sufficient image."
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ksa0ta | why Japan become one of the two main centres of the video game industry. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has a lot to do with why they also became a major technology power - a.k.a. the Postwar Economic Miracle. During the post-WWII years, Japan received heavy western investment, especially from the US. Combined with Japan not being involved in major conflicts directly and clothe ability for large businesses to take off and maintain stable directions, Japan was able to turn around quickly and develop new technology for home use. Further, the US was directly involved in this rebuilding, so many ideas were shared between the two. In fact, Sega, aka Service Games, created one of the first arcade games under American leadership. Because of the ability to develop consumer technology so quickly without war interfering and this exchange of ideas with other major video game producer, Japan was able to develop a video game industry that outpaced most other nations, save perhaps the US."
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ksaybl | How did technology grow so fast only in the last 200 years? And especially enormously in the last 40 years? Did humans become more intelligent? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Science builds upon itself. The scientific method itself is fairly recent, once we had a framework for using empirical data to create theories which we then test against more data we were able to get a much better understanding of the world. There were also some major breakthroughs which really let technology take off, Maxwells equations and the theory of electromagnetism allowing us to generate and use electricity was a major innovation. After that the development of quantum mechanics lead to most of our most advanced technologies today by allowing us to create nanoscale transistors which are the technology behind computers.",
"People didn't become more intelligent, they became better connected and simply greater in numbers. In the old days before mass communication or anything, if somebody made a minor improvement to something in some art of the world, like a different way to make pottery or tools or domesticated crops, it would take generations for that improvement to filter though all the way to the other side of the world. If then somebody on the far side of the connected world makes an improvement based on that improvement it will take a long time for that to filter all the way back to the origin. When during the enlightenment people started sending letters back and forth and were able to build on each others ideas with only a few weeks of delay despite being in different parts of Europe that accelerated things quite a lot. Today people can communicated in real time with email and phone and publishing things on the net. Furthermore there are a lot more people around today. so thanks to modern technology the number of people who work on anything and the speed at which they can improve on each other ideas is greatly improved. If one of the things they work on is faster and better collaboration technologies this means exponential growth for the overall speed of progress.",
"2 words: Exponential growth. And the beauty of it is that it only requires one circumstance: the rate of change (=progress) depends on the amount of stuff already there. The more you know, the better you can generate new knowledge. The more tech already exists, the easier it is to build better.",
"Automation and capitalism helped too. One dude figures out you can build carriages that don’t need horses. He calls them cars and sells them to people. Next guy figures out you can make a machine to build the cars for you. He can then sell more cars. People copy his ideas in other markets. Things become more automated. Machines do the work faster than people do and in larger quantities. That means less time is spent doing labor and more time spent thinking about stuff and thinking about how to sell it. Yes I’m oversimplifying but I hope you get the idea.",
"The scientific method. It sorts ideas from myths through observation, speculation, trial and error, and analysis. It's an incredibly effective tool for advancing technology.",
"We've developed machines to be smart for us. Nowadays there is no need to calculate things by hand, computers do it. With all that new found mental processing power people can focus more on creativity and innovation than on making already existing technology function",
"It is about food. Throughout history most people have been working in industries related to food production. Most people were farmers but people were also dedicating their lives to make farm equipment, transporting food and goods and cooking. This was very time consuming manual jobs. People were barely able to produce enough to have food on the table and a warm place to stay. Even most educated people were dedicating their lives to the administration of communities so that people had food on their table. There were very few people who could actually work with improving sociaty in a lasting way. This did however change in the late 1700s and early 1800s. There are a number of inventions and discoveries that might have triggered it. There were new crops from America improving crop yields by a lot, ships were reliably crossing huge oceans, printing presses meant information could more easily be distributed and more people learned to read, our understanding of mechanical engineering became advanced enough to make mechanised factories and eventually we got steam engines as an easy way to power these machines, there were also a number of huge improvements within agriculture and food processing happening at this time. Different people argue about which one were the most important and which came because of the other. But the end result was that a large number of the population became redundant. There were indeed huge protests and riots in many country by people who had just lost jobs to machines. However sociaty were then able to feed people in other industries then food production. The initial change might not have been very big but it meant that the people who were now out of a job had to come up with some other way of being productive to sociaty. And a lot of them were able to come up with new inventions and discoveries that further reduced the labor demand. So from living in a sociaty where 70-80% were farmers and many of the rest were working in related industries we now live in a sociaty where only about 2% are farmers. And we are still seeing that manual jobs and other routine jobs are being phased out in favor of jobs which have a more lasting impact on the world.",
"Technology snowballs. There's that phrase \"standing on the shoulders of giants\". When you get an education today, you're enjoying thousands of years of discovery, scientific inquiry, experimentation, and education. And when you're done with your education, you can start with all that knowledge in your back pocket. On top of that, there are literally more brains in the world today than there used to be. There are about 6 billion human minds on Earth today. A hundred years ago that was only about 1.5 billion human minds. Five hundred years ago, less than half a billion human minds. If you go back 100.000 years, you're looking at a relatively tiny number of humans. Humans were preoccupied with surviving their environment, finding food, and getting through the seasons. They had limited means for invention and when inventions were made, they had limited means for passing that knowledge on. It would take another 90.000 years or so before people progressed enough that they started to figure out how they could use agriculture to ensure greater food security. Compare that to the tools, knowledge, security and other advantages today and it's no surprise progress is made more quickly.",
"Knowledge aggregation. Basically, the more people there are and the more we are able to share ideas the more insights and discoveries we make. This leads to greater sharing and more people, leading to a circle of this with ever increasing speed. Each large shift that has led to either greater knowledge sharing or increased population has led to leaps forward.",
"One of the biggest contributors to the increasingly rapid pace of scientific advancement was the invention of the printing press and the advent of mass literacy. More people being able to read about new ideas and try them out themselves increased the rate at which new technologies were invented and spread. In earlier times a civilization in the Middle East could have vastly superior knowledge of science and mathematics than one a few hundred miles away in Europe, and it would stay that way for a hundred years or more. With mass literacy and cheap books and pamphlets via the printing press, the rate at which knowledge could spread greatly increased. With that came improvements in technology that further sped up the rate of knowledge transfer, such as faster, more reliable ships, better roads, railways, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and finally the internet. Now someone can discover something new in China and American, European and African scientists can know about it and begin trying to replicate the findings within a day of publication, within hours even. Thousands of scientists and engineers and hobbyists, millions even, all over the world can share information with almost no delay.",
"A lot of things happened, but three big ones I can think of are Adam Smith's \"Wealth of Nations\", the move from burning wood - which required huge amounts of wood and manpower - to coal, and of course the development of modern farming. With more leisure time and a wealthier population, there was more time for education and intellectual pursuits.",
"The population of Earth approximately doubled from 1750 to 1900 to about 1.5 billion people. It is now 5 times that 120 years later. That many people and that many minds at work creates the situation for rapid advancement. Every downfall of civilization had a corresponding drop in the population. We haven't had a significant drop in the human population in the last 270 years."
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ksbkoh | Why is that when a phone's battery is old or damaged, it displays different battery percentage when it is switched on and when it is switched off? | I have a fairly old phone whose battery is in serious need of replacement and I've observed that when the phone is switched off, it shows a certain battery percentage, and when it is powered on, it shows a much higher percentage and drains away kuch faster too. Why is the battery showing different values when it's on and when it's off? Do they use different methods to evaluate the remaining battery? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Over time the batteries deteriorate and lose capacity, that's what your seeing, phone is trying to determine battery percentage and the battery isn't at the capacity it used to be. Someone else probably has a much more fantastic way of explaining this, but I'm pretty sure this is it",
"Your power bar isn't a direct measurement of what's left in the battery. It's a measurement of the battery plus a whole lot of programming logic to try to determine how long it will last on a scale of 1-100. It seems the programming may be a bit optimistic when the phone is first turned on, and then it adjusts the percentage as it starts seeing what sorry shape the battery is in."
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kscdbm | Why do TV signals seem to move? | We have an antenna. Why is it that one day we can have a great signal, and the next day that channel can be basically non-existent? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Weather more than likely. Rain, Clouds, even increased solar activity can interfere with the signal.",
"Weather mostly. Air pressure and humidity can bend the broadcasted signal away from your location. All the little water drops in the air can bend the TV signals like when rain makes rainbows. Some days the signal might be loud enough for your TV to understand. On others you might be in a dead spot like a dark area under a cloud."
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ksckc6 | how does the internet live forever and what would it take to completely shut it down and lose all archives of it | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"the internet is the set of connections between various computers. compare it to the network of roads in your country. you can block all roads leading to one specific city (\"Facebook-town\", \"Google-city\", whatever), but simply blocking one or two will generally only make that destination a bit harder to reach but not remove it from the map. to completely shutdown all roads/the internet you'd need to cut all connections and in the case of the internet thats not just cables but also wireless (satellite) connections, making it virtually impossible to really shut it down 100%. but in both cases cutting of some high-traffic/central destinations will lead to chaos and upheaval. to lose ALL archives you'd need to destroy all harddrives connected to the internet, but a lot of stuff is just on a few harddrives, so if you destroyed 20% of all harddrives something like 10% of all content could be lost forever.",
"internet is a network. Contrary to what some people seem to think of it, it's not \"in one place\". It's the grouping of many computer working together. And when I say computer, I don't mean \"a dozen computer placed around the world\", I mean literally every computer that is connected to it become a part of it. Internet is the biggest network of all. The one biggest network that regroup the majority of computer devices. To shut it down, you would need to either completely remove or destroy the infrastructure that allow computer to work together. The archives on the internet are not somewhere, they're everywhere. Every computer hold some information that belong to it. Wikipedia has its own server that hold whatever is on wikipedia, facebook has its own server that own these info etc etc. Cutting them from the internet wouldn't make you \"lose the archive\", but rather they would be unavailable through the internet.",
"While what people are saying here is correct, the vast, vast majority of the internet is simply consuming content rather than hosting it. And things are getting more and more centralized by the day. So even though it is effectively impossible to \"shut down\" the entire internet, taking down a few data centers owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google is going to have a massive impact, so much so that it will effectively be dead for the average user. There is also a bit of nuance between definitions of the internet and \"the web\", and I suspect you are mostly talking about the latter.",
"Slightly less technical - but still true! If a large Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) hit earth, it has the potential to knock out the internet and all radio and other electrical transmission lines for a prolonged period of time. The last time this happened was 1859, and then it only took out telegram transmissions as that was all that existed. If it happened now it would be catastrophic. A strong CME occurred in 2012, but luckily the earth was not in the right location to be effected. If the CME had happened 9 days later it would have hit us. Some scientists hypothesize that it could have taken out the internet worldwide for 12-18 months."
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ksf49b | Why are video file sizes so small? | A normal image stored on a phone is around 5 mb, if you calculate that way, a 1080p 60 fps video should be 60 frames X 5 mb X 600 seconds = 180000 MB= 180GB. But if you check a file size of an actual 10 minute video, it is only around 1GB. How can it be so small? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Video compression. The video file doesn’t store every frame, it just stores what changes between frames. Periodically there will be a full frame, called a “key frame”, just to reset everything but most of the “frames” in the file are just a small list of changes from the prior frame. Unless there’s a jump cut, there is usually very little difference between adjacent frames. Basically, the video file isn’t the video, it’s instructions to the software on how to recreate the video in real time.",
"Here's a Tom Scott video that's great at explaining and demonstrating video compression [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"Videos generally don't store every single frame. Since most frames in a video are only a little different from the one before it (either colours changing slightly or pixels moving slightly), you can instead include instructions on how to draw the next frame based on changing the previous one. This is a much smaller amount of data.",
"Multiple reasons. A 5MB JPEG (compressed) image is probably 20 megapixels in resolution. While even 4K video is equivalent to an 8 megapixel image size. That's automatically 2.5 times smaller of you choose, for want of a better common ground, the same 'compression rate' or loss of image quality. But you actually can have different levels of compression and image quality. Also, video doesn't store individual frames for the whole le gth of the clip. The largest part of a video file is recording movements, and therefore almost no information is required for parts of the image that don't move.",
"The short ELI5 answer is the difference between 'i frames' and 'p frames'. So, in a common compression algorithm, you would ideally want fewer 'i frames'. An 'i frame' is the whole picture, the 'p frame' is the difference between the original 'i frame' and whatever event is unfolding. For example, say (and this was me one job ago) you have a surveillance camera pointed at a road with little traffic on it. The i frame will capture the scene, each subsequent i frame will be very small. A video file with this scene will be very small. Now, put some traffic on that road, each car represents more difference from the original i frame, so the p frames will be larger. So, busy scenes = bigger file size, sedate scenes = smaller file size. When the video is 'finished', once all the editing is done, the compression algorithm can compress most of the P frames because the same data is found in the i frame. This will make the file size noticeably smaller. I frames cannot be compressed in this manner since they are the reference frame and, by definition, has all the bits needed to recreate the scene. So, depending on how you compress, you are trying to hold down the number of i frames that are in the finished product. An editor or IT guy will really never think about this unless we are charged with storing all this video data, as I had to. Otherwise, we are just content to say 'compression works and it is basically lossless.'",
"Compression between frames When you take a picture your phone compresses it before saving it, but it only has the data in that one frame to work with. A picture of a deer running in front of a forest will get compressed really well in the area showing a clear blue sky but can't be compressed as much (without losing too much quality) in the detail rich areas showing the forest and the grass Videos are compressed first *between frames* then within the frame. Take a video of a deer running in front of a forest, how many times should you save the data showing the blue sky at the top? Just once. Compression between frames gives wayyyy better results because things tend to stay in roughly the same place in a video or just get shifted so you can just store \"take block 17, move 5 pixels left\" rather than having to store the entirety of block 17 for every single frame. Ever encounter a GIF that's massive but the GIFV is really small? That's because GIFs are compressed frame by frame, but have no compression between frames, they're effectively a series of full images like you're thinking of and can't benefit from the pixels staying the same over time which is why a GIF can be 10x bigger than the same file saved as a video"
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ksinn0 | How does hacking work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most hacking takes the form of social engineering--\"Hi this is the password compliance department, could you please tell me your password so I can check it for weakness?\" Usually it's more subtle than that, but you'd be amazed at how many people will just tell you their password (or use the same username and password on some stupid web game that they use on their bank account; if you use the same password on your Reddit or ANY OTHER ACCOUNT as on banking and financial websites, change them now). When it comes to actual software vulnerabilities it often comes down to looking at the specification for some procedure and identifying assumptions that the specification makes (or that someone implementing the software could have made) and seeing what happens if you break that assumption. As an example, there was a vulnerability known as \"heartbleed\" where there's a bit of communication with servers to check that they're online. That communication involves a person's computer sending them a message that essentially says \"If you're alive, encrypt the following 11-character message and send it back: \"Hello world!\" The assumption here is that the message that's sent will be the same length as is claimed. In one widespread implementation of that algorithm there was no check that that assumption was accurate, so you could do things like asking as server to encrypt the 1000-character message \"Hello World!\". In response the server would encrypt those 11 characters and the next 989 characters that it finds in memory (which could include sensitive data). Another example was the \"spectre\" and \"meltdown\" family of attacks that made waves more recently. These vulnerabilities work off of a technology known as \"speculative execution.\" Sometimes a computer has to wait on a check that is going to take a long time to complete. Rather than just sit there and wait the computer will charge ahead, assuming that the check has succeeded or failed based on what it has observed in the past for that check. If it turns out that the processor guessed right then it's ahead of the game. If it got things wrong then it undoes all the work it had speculatively completed. The assumption here is that undoing all of that work makes it impossible for information to escape from that branch--it should be like it never happened. That assumption turned out to be false because you can trick a processor into speculatively executing commands that load illegal-to-access information into cache (extremely fast memory). You can then figure out what information was loaded into cache by checking how long it takes to access the information.",
"Hacking is exploiting oversights, mistakes, or just bugs in computer system. For example hacker can send a request for a computer to do something, that does something the developer didnt think somebody would try, and didnt \"prepare\" his program for it. One very common tactic is \"overflowing\" with is sending instructions longer than intended, the computer tries to put then in its memory, but its too big and overflows overriting the code next to it. if the hacker knows what it will overflow, he can put his own code there that will do something he wants, for example delete a file, send something etc. im no expert but thats approximately how i understand it works"
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kskgz7 | Why are numbers on a telephone keypad set out differently to a calculator keypad? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So back in the 50s, AT & T swapped from rotary to touch tone phones and they needed a pattern for the new keys. So they ran a study and tested 15 different layouts. Oddly enough, people preferred the telephone layout over the calculator layout. So that's what they went with. Further reading (including pictures of the extra patterns) -- [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"AT & T did some research a long time ago to design the keypad to speed up dialing times and found that ascending numbers from top to bottom was the most intuitive",
"Warning: slightly off topic. I was watching several YouTube videos about mechanical calculator and adders (such as Comptometer), so don't treat me as an expert in this field. Anyway, those devices have a common layout that was somehow forced by the design principles that they were using. There are separate sets of keys 1 to 9 for units, tenths, hundreds etc., but the common pattern of arranging keys was bottom-up (1s are closest to the user). Early models with single set of digits (0 to 9) used a layout that we're familiar with."
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kstfa9 | when you turn a cars engine on the speedometer and the rpm reader go all the way to the highest number, why? | A question is a question why tf are you downvoting | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s a self test. It proves the gauges work. Same reason almost all the lights come on. It would suck for your engine to explode from no oil because the low oil pressure light was burned out. It’s a common feature on airplanes too. That’s why there’s a “master caution” light that comes on if any other light is supposed to come on. The odds Of both bulbs burning out at the same time is pretty low."
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ksypup | How does dust accumulate in an electric fans blades while they’re constantly moving fast in a circular motion? | it’s really been getting on my nerves the amount of times i have to clean this thing, how do they stick and accumulate on a fast moving blade? i’d greatly appreciate a response! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hey, aerospace engineer here. There's a long complicated aerodynamic explanation but here's the short of it. ELI5: at the point where air meets the surface of the blade, the speed of the air is zero. Therefore, a piece of dust on the surface is not being blown anywhere. When you spin the blade through the air, it slams dust particles onto the blade, and those particles don't get blown anywhere. This is similar to why water accumulates on a windshield even though you're travelling at 60 mph. Edit: after talking it through with another reddit, I was off a bit. The airspeed is zero, but the horizontal forces is not. The likely cause for sticking is that the dust particles are not large enough for the air pressure to blow the dust off the fan. Perhaps there is an upper limit to the amount of dust that can accumulate, at which point the surface area is big enough for the forces to blow it off.",
"The blade that moves through the air tends to get an electrostatic charge and if can result in the dust getting attached to the blades a lot more than if there was no charge. The dust that accumulates tends to be very fine particles. Because the blades push the air around a lot of air will pass over the blades so the can accumulate dust faster rotation then stations for the simple reason there is more air and dust in contact with them when they rotate. The moment of air can remove stuff but stuff can still be stuck to a surface. There is a reason you need to clean cars even if they move fast through the air. Passenger jets tend to have windscreen wipers on the two forward-looking windows so you can remove water or anything ells that accumulate on them. If you fly through an insect swarm the will accumulate on the windows and another part of the aircraft.",
"Remember rubbing a balloon up against your hair as a kid and your hair would stick to the balloon? Your fan is the balloon and dust is the hair. As the fan spins, dust is attracted to the fan like hair on a balloon and sticks to it.",
"The air touching the blades isn’t moving. Kinda hard to conceive but YouTube wind tunnel testing with cars, they use smoke to test the aerodynamics. If you watch closely the smoke never actually touches the car, but moves ever so slightly above it. That small cushion of air is how it’s able to stay and stick",
"Static electricity happens when the fan blades travel through the air quickly and brush the air molecules to move them out of the way. These molecules will build up an electrical charge on the leading edge of your fan blade, which is why dust particles will collect and stick more to one side than the other. Because I was lazy to formulate the principle, I just copy pasted above from google search result"
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kszjex | With 60 frames per second being my gaming default; Why do movies running at 24 frames per second look smooth to me but I'm easily able to classify games running at 30 frames per second as stuttering and slow? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. Cameras in movies are stationary most of the time. Movies start feeling stuttery when there are rapid camera movements. This is sometimes nauseating for me. 2. Movies have accurate motion blur, which makes it harder to notice the individual frames. 3. The intervals between frames are consistent (~40ms). When you get 30 fps in-game, the frametimes fluctuate, making it look jittery. 4. You are in control of your camera in-game, so your brain knows what to expect when you move your mouse. When the image is stuttery, your brain doesn't get what it wants, so it feels unpleasant. This is not the case for movies."
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kt1c7u | What is happening inside a computer's CPU that causes it to generate so much heat? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thousands upon thousands of electrical signals every fraction of a second roar through the microscopic circuits of a CPU. Moving electrical signals cause heat due to material resistance. So, things get very hot and require some sort of cooling mechanism."
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kt28vq | How does my phone differentiate between knuckle and finger touches? | My phone turns on the flashlight with a doubletap and takes a screenshot with a doubletap of the knuckle. I know the technology is called FingerSense but how does it work within the hard- and software? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"FingerSense is a software-based solution that works using sensors many smart phones already have. It doesn't require any additional tech on top of those. For example, when you tap your phone with a knuckle, you cause more vibrations than when you touch it with a finger. FingerSense picks up on these by monitoring the device's accelerometer (\"movement detector\"), and hence can tell the difference."
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kt362i | What is a laser "made of"? | What is exactly a cutting laser (meaning the lasers used to cut stuff). What is it "made of" is we could say so and how does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Laser stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation The beam itself is literally made of light. With regards to a cutting laser, that light is focused and so intense that it melt, burns, or otherwise vaporizes what it hits. Have you ever burned an ant with a magnifying glass? It’s a similar concept but with laser light and more power. This might help for a little in depth background URL_0",
"Laser is \"just\" light generated in a particular way so the beam is very \"tight\" (*coherent*). So it's basically just light. This is true for any kind of laser, not just the cutting ones (although the way light is produced may be different)."
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kt3c5j | How does my car's A/C work for years and years - where does the burnt Freon (or whatever) go? | I have a five year old sedan, and the a/c has always worked fine. How can you burn Freon and not run out? I suppose this applies to refrigerators and all a/c's as well. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Freon doesn’t burn. The heat (or energy) in the cabin air in your car is used to convert the Freon into a gas, so the heat is pulled out of the air making it feel cooler. The Freon is then condensed outside the cabin of your car. Condensing the Freon from a gas to a liquid pulls the heat out, and the AC dumps that heat into the atmosphere outside the cabin of your car. Freon is in a continual loop from gas to liquid. If your AC has a small leak in the loop, you can lose Freon over time.",
"Freon isn’t burning... It’s meant to be a closed system. The goal is that you want to move heat from one place to another... in the case of refrigeration, you want the heat from inside the compartment to move to the outside. To do this you need freon to evaporate, evaporation removes heat, this is why we sweat. The evaporated from then travels in a loop to a place where it gets compressed and then condensed back into a liquid. This released heat into the atmosphere outside of the compartment. URL_0",
"It's a closed cycle. You're not burning the refrigerant. It just stays in there until your hoses leak, the compressor goes or you spring a leak elsewhere in the AC system. Refrigerants are funny things that take away a lot of heat when they change states, but are easy to compress back into a liquid. You boil the liquid in the place you want cool and move air over that. Then you compress the gas back to a liquid somewhere else where you can get rid of excess heat (under the hood). You're cool inside, while boiling crazy temperatures happen elsewhere. Actually burning real Freon is very dangerous... Don't do that. If you want to learn more, look up the ammonia refrigerant cycle for a really neat system that's easy to understand. Then start with R12/R134 type systems. Ammonia is how an RV refrigerator runs by burning propane. Literally heat becomes cold.",
"There’s no burning of the refrigerant. Your AC works the same way your fridge does - it’s a closed system that circulates the refrigerant between the compressor and the expander, carrying heat with it. The energy needed for the process comes from your car power source, not from the AC."
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kt4489 | why can't full computer memory be used? | Say I have 16GB of Ram on my pc, it will say 16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable). The same occurs with permanent storage. Why is that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It can be used, just not all by you. The computer needs to reserve parts for its own uses. As an example, some parts of the hard drive are used to tell the computer what's on the hard drive to begin with! Without that overhead stuff, the computer wouldn't be able to use the hard drive at all (or at least not in any way that was practical).",
"Some memory is reserved for the system, things like the OS and certain hardware. With storage it's a whole different story. Windows measures drive sizes in powers of two, i.e. 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes, etc.(these are actually called ki*bi*bytes, me*bi*bytes and so on, but Windows doesn't use that terminology). Meanwhile, hard drive manufacturers use powers of 10, i.e. 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes and so on. Because 1 terabyte is approximately 931 gibibytes, a 1 TB hard drive appears as \"only\" 931 GB."
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21,
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kt4als | What are drivers? | I’ve recently had to update some drivers on my laptop and I’m struggling to grasp how updating software can make the hardware better, it’s still the same graphics card in the machine, why do I need to update it to make it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Drivers are how we instruct an operating system to talk with a specific device that is attached. Rather than the OS know how to talk to each and every possible piece of hardware (like, say, every printer ever), it knows how to talk to a printer driver. All printer drivers speak the same language to the OS, and then they will translate it into the appropriate language for the specific printer they're made for.",
"Think of drivers like actual drivers (of cars). The cars are your video card, and the roads are like CPU hardware. You are the driver. Lets say you've got a fancy new lamborghini (video card). You want to really see what this thing will do. Oh, and we're in a place you've never been before... If you or I (drivers v1.0) were to drive it, we'd probably be able to get from point A to B, but since we're not race car drivers, we're going to stall, and probably get lost. We'll work, but not optimally. Lets say we get a map of our locale and try again (drivers v1.1) We can improve our knowledge of our surroundings, plus we have some experience from our first trip... We do a little better. Now, we hire the Stig, and find out that he grew up just around the corner! (drivers v2.0) He knows the area, he knows the car (because he's an expert at both), so everything will work more smoothly. Does that make sense?",
"> it’s still the same graphics card in the machine, why do I need to update it to make it work? First, like every software also drivers have their own bugs, so updating can fix bugs (if the new version fixed those bugs, that is). Second, new driver version can increase performance if they run some math (remember, everything really boils down to math) in a more optimized way.",
"Drivers is what let's your system talk to your hardware. Generally, when you update your driver's, it should improve/simplify how your computer talks to the hardware allowing it to work better. It should be like going from \"it does not\" to \"it doesn't\" which should help it work better. Sometimes though, it doesn't understand how it works which can make it worse. Think of it of as explaining colloquial words to a person that has English as their 2nd language. Sometimes they get it and pick up easily and helps them understand English better. Sometimes they don't understand it and don't use it properly."
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kt4ltv | how do projectors make the color black on white screens? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't really, they just don't shine any light at that area. That means that the \"black\" will be the same color as the screen, which is why projectors only really work in dark rooms.",
"They don't - it is impossible for a projector to make a surface darker, only lighter. The projectors get around this by primarily being used in dark rooms and projecting on special materials that help to isolate and direct light. They also take advantage of a little quirk in our brains where the perceived lightness/darkness of a surface is impacted by the surrounding areas. We've all seen the [shadow illusion]( URL_0 ) where squares A and B are actually the same color, but our brain sees them as different because of the surrounding colors. Thanks to this, something can appear 'black' on a projector, despite the fact that it is actually just the color of the projector screen.",
"They don’t. Projectors work by projecting mixtures of light to make colors. White is a combination of all the light colors and black is the absence of all light. So in an image with black portions, no light gets projected to those parts. A plain white screen is not a very good choice for projected images. What you really want is something that can reflect light very well when hit with light but otherwise will remain dark. This is why projectors work best in darkened rooms and we used to use silver screens to project to. So basically the more light in the room and the lighter the screen you have, the more washed out looking and overall bright looking will be your projected image.",
"It does not. Black will be the absence of any light from the projector so it will have the same color as the surface you project on. So you need a projector that emits a lot of light so the areas around it look a lot brighter and you see the unlit white areas as a lot darker. Grey as a color is white with less light intensity compared to the surrounding. Look at [this image.]( URL_0 ) square A and B have the same color but you think of A as gray and B as white because of the surrounding areas and the shading you see from the green object. If you open it in an image editor and pick the color they are the same, you can do the same by cutting holes in a paper so you only see those squares. So human vision is based on the light relative to the surrounding not the absolute amount of light The dark color in a projected image in a well-lit room will look washed because they are a lot brighter because of light that does not come from the projector There is a reason that in a cinema you turn the light off in the theater so very little light hits the area that should be black.",
"A projector can not make the screen any darker then the ambient light in the room does. However your eyes are already used to this and will only perceive relative light levels. So when seeing the screen in both light and dark white we automatically interpret the darker areas as black even though it is actually fairly bright."
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kt5rss | Why is 16:9 the desired TV resolution scale, and why did it replace 4:3? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gijzuma",
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"text": [
"Turns out there isn't really a standard and there's not a great reason for what we have! No expert but I did just happen to watch Captain Disillusion's youtube video on just this topic. I'd recommend watching it [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"16:9 is not a resolution but an aspect ratio. It describes the with vs height of the screen regardless of the number of pixels. For example, 1080P is 1920x1080 and 4K for TV is 3840x2160 both use 16:9 even if the resolution is not the same. 4K has 4x the number of pixels 16:9 (1.777:1) is the geometric mean of 4:3 (1.333...:1) that older TV use and the 2.35:1 that was the most common move aspect ratio. So sqrt(1.333...\\*2.35) = 1.770 and it was changed to the close integer ration 16:9 The reason it was chosen to minimize the number of black bars on the side for old 4:3 TV and bars on top and bottom for movies. You have to remember that when widescreen TV started to be sold most TV would be in 4:3 so it would be used for that a lot. if 2.35:1 was used old TV would only be half the with of the new TV and is harder for people to pay a lot for a new TV when only half the screen would be used for TV. The 16:9 format was first used in analog TV and the digital TV standard later adopted it."
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kt5zpo | What is the difference between a compiler and an interpreter? Why use one over the other? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Imagine you're vacationing in France, but you don't speak any French. You want to visit the Eiffel Tower today, and your hotel concierge has written down the directions to get there, but they're in French. You can solve this 2 ways. Your bilingual friend can read the French instructions, figure out what they mean, and then write them down for you in English. Now you've got a list of directions written in your native language, and you have everything you need to go on the trip alone. In this case, your friend has acted as a compiler. OR, your bilingual friend can come along with you, and can read the French directions with you and explain what each instruction means as you go. In this case, your friend is an interpreter. The compiler approach is much more lightweight, because you only have to bring your translated directions with you, and not an entire person. It may also be faster in carrying the instructions out, because you can just follow the directions one after another without having to stop and discuss each one. The interpreter approach is not as streamlined, but potentially a little more flexible. If it turns out there are some errors in the directions and you end up going down the wrong road, an interpreter *might* be able to help you figure out where you went wrong and get back on track, whereas if you encounter an error in your translated English instructions, you're pretty much high and dry, and you have no choice but to terminate your excursion then and there.",
"Compilers and interpreters both serve the same basic role: translating a computer programming language that's easy for humans to reason about into a language that's easy for computers to reason about. The difference between them is that a compiler performs that translation all at once, taking in a human readable program and spitting out one that a computer can (more easily) execute. Interpreters perform the translation at runtime, as needed. The biggest tradeoff here is that a compiler takes (potentially) a long time to perform the entire translation, but then when it comes time to run the program there's no translation work needed so the program can be very fast. The compiler also reasons about the whole program at once and can be set up to spend more time optimizing the resulting code, further increasing speed. An interpreted language doesn't need that compilation step so it can be very fast to iterate on, but they tend to be slower. Also, you can have different interpreters for different systems, so it can be easier to make a program that can work on lots of different hardware. Often a program will go through both a compiler and interpreter. The classic example of this is Java, which goes through a compilation step from the original human readable source code to an intermediate \"bytecode,\" then at runtime there's an interpreter (the Java runtime environment) that turns that bytecode into the actual instructions. More broadly, though, even compiled languages like C and C++ generally get compiled down to assembly. That is still one step above the actual ones and zeroes of a processor's execution, so processors run a basic interpreter to carry out the assembly instructions (see: \"microcode\"). Smaller microcontrollers may omit this step, storing the assembly instructions in a format that is directly digestible by the hardware itself."
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kt6zn9 | how those "I'm not a robot" checks on websites work. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"gik64g7"
],
"text": [
"They're usually measuring how fast clicks happen and how the mouse is moving across the screen. A bot is usually programmed to \"snap\" or teleport instantly to the images or checkbox, and that's a giveaway that it's almost certainly not a human checking the box. Same thing if it just receives an instant click as soon as the box appears, since most people don't have that fast of a reaction time."
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kt7chz | File type conversions | I was in the process of converting a .wav file to be used as a ringtone on my iPhone and the process struck me as odd. There were several conversions between the WAV and the m4r. I used an online conversion tool to convert to .aac, a separate process within iTunes to convert to .m4a then for the final step I was able to simply show the file extension and change .m4a to .m4r. My question is, why does one conversion require a converter tool while others allow just changing the extension yourself? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gik8lk5"
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"text": [
"Changing the extension on a file doesn't change the file type. For instance, if you the extension on a picture file from .png to .jpg, it's still a .png file. When you go to open it, the software will recognize that it's a .png file and display it as such. But no conversion has happened. When you actually convert a file to a new format, you are changing how the information in the file is recorded (could be compressed, some information could be tossed out to save space at the expense of the quality of the image or audio file, etc.), and then how it is played back in the software."
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7
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ktdond | Why does a PC/Laptop continue to play music after unplugging headphones while a mobile pauses? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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],
"text": [
"Because that is how the software is programmed. On Android there is a specific setting to pause when headphones are disconnected so you can turn it off if you wanted. I assume iPhone has a setting but maybe Apple doesn't think users would want that sort of control. The behavior makes more sense to be on by default for a phone where it's much more likely that you'll accidentally catch a headphone cord and accidentally unplug in public. Less likely to happen on a computer and less likely to be an issue if it does."
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ktdopv | Why do people look ugly when they take pictures with their front cameras? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The cameras are usually of poorer quality than rear cameras but that's not the primary reason. The primary reason is front lens cameras are usually what we call wide angle cameras. This means they can see more around them (they are less \"zoomed in\") than the rear facing camera, because to fit an entire face and more into a selfie requires a wide field of view. Wide fields of view though are widely regarded to not look really flattering. [Here is an example of photos taken with various lenses showing you how this effect looks.]( URL_0 ). Note for iPhones, the front facing camera is closer to the first image and the primary rear camera is the second image, still a massive difference. This effect is slightly less worse as well if you take the photo from further away and zoom in. Selfies are taken close though because armspan.",
"Usually bad lighting combined with wide angle lens being too close because you can't take a photo of yourself further than arm's length without some sort of holder. It fucks up facial proportions. Also if you mean your own photos, you are not used to seeing yourself the same way other people do because you can only ever see your face as a mirror image in real life and that's what you are used to. Set your phone on a timer, take enough distance to the camera, plan the lighting and flip the image horizontally afterwards and you will be happy with it."
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ktivxw | What makes a AAA battery different from a AA battery other than it being smaller? What’s the actual difference ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gimbmtv"
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"text": [
"It's like the difference between a 5 gallon gas can, and a 1 gallon. They store the same thing, which burns the same, one just holds more. That said, there are different battery chemistries with different characteristics. But those are all available in both sizes."
],
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15
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ktjbz1 | How are computers motivated in Q Learning? | I get that it uses a number going up and down depending on the behavior, but why does the computer/AI try to make the number go up? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gime1m2",
"gimeg8j"
],
"text": [
"The goal is to maximize the reward. It’s explicitly told that higher is better. Nearly all machine learning is centered around maximizing our minimizing some target.",
"Computers don't want, or care about, anything until we give them a program that tells them what to want/care about. (I'm anthropomorphizing computers here, obviously, but you get the point.) In machine learning, we give the computer a \"value function\" or a \"reward function\" that tells them how good a job they're doing, and then we tell them that their goal in life is to maximize that function. Once we tell them that, they go after it with everything they have. That's simply how programming works; if you write code that gets the machine to come up with some options, work out what the reward would be for each option and then choose the one with the highest reward, then assuming the computer's working correctly, that's what it will do."
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ktl0h3 | What are VPNs and how do they work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"VPNs are often described as tunnels, but they're a bit more like a secret code. Think of the internet as being like the postal service. When you visit a website, your computer is just exchanging letters with a server (a sort of special computer) somewhere that holds the information on the website. Your computer sends a data packet via your internet service provider (ISP) like giving the letter to a courier. The courier takes it to a sorting office. Another courier takes it to the website (using their ISP). But crucially, the address and your return address need to be on the envelope. This means both ISPs know who you're talking to. Say your ISP suddenly decided they didn't like Netflix. They could just refuse to deliver letters to them. (Unlikely, but technically possible.) Or maybe your government wants to know who you're talking to. They could just force the ISP to give them a list. Now, a VPN is like a private middleman. You and the VPN company share a secret password. You use this to encode messages. Instead of directly addressing your letter to Netflix, you address your encoded message to the VPN, and in the message you put in Netflix's address. The courier takes it to the VPN. They unscramble the message, and send it to Netflix *from the VPN*. This means it can't be traced back to you. Netflix get the message and reply to the VPN. The VPN knows it's for you, so they scramble it again and send it back to you, and you unscramble it. This way, your ISP doesn't know who you're talking to except from the VPN company. The other way this can work is that you use a university/work VPN. This way, you're sending your scrambled messages to work and back. Because they're more scrambled than usual, it's more secure so you're allowed to access more files etc. It's almost like you're directly plugged in to the network."
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ktmzev | What does the specification chargers usually mean like Output: 5V=2A or 5V=6A MAX ? | I was looking at my One Plus Warp charger and I saw that the output says 2A or 6A at 5V. What does this exactly mean? Edit: I wanted to add some more info. When I charge my brother's mi phone(screen displays fast charging when I use mi charger at 5V and 3A) from my charger it doesn't show fast charging. So does the warp charger operate at 3A when it is charging the mi phone or at 2A? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gimzuee"
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"text": [
"The V rating describes the voltage. For most systems, this should *perfectly* match the rating of the thing you charge. If your phone charges at five volts, you want a 5v charger. The Amp rating is a limit. Your device should not exceed the charger's maximum amperage (current). Most devices, like phones, will automatically adjust and so it is not an issue. Something like a computer monitor, however, may not be designed to do so, and so you must be more careful when choosing a power cable for such a device."
],
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ktnajw | How do radtio/tv station know how many people are tuned in ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gin1k4m"
],
"text": [
"I was a panel member for Nielsen. They give a small percentage of the public a device (that looks like a pager) that tracks most media consumption through an inaudible tone that is broadcasted on radio, TV, etc. They then multiply the numbers and there you have your ratings!"
],
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ktnkse | How did Parler become an alt platform, with the name being a French word? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gin3nol"
],
"text": [
"I’m sure that was not a mistake. It was created as a “free speech platform” due to some on the right believing they were being banned off of other social media platforms. Now whether this is true or not isn’t the question here, but it was at least advertised as such. “Free speech” being the term of the day, Parler makes sense as a name."
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ktqw91 | How do OS installers works if there isn't any OS that could manage applications in an empty computer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A computer has a thing called the BIOS built into its ROM. One of the jobs this has is to boot the machine--it can do this from the built-in hard drive, or a DVD-ROM, or USB key. Once it's booted from one of those sources it turns over control to whatever code it just loaded and stays mostly out of the way. So, the OS installer just has to be set up as something the BIOS can boot from and it will then run quite happily. Once upon a time, in the early days of PCs when you might not even have a disc drive attached, the computer would boot into a ROM-resident version of the BASIC programming language if it didn't find any other boot source, but they removed that a long time ago.",
"There actually is something *kind of* like a very rudimentary OS built into an empty PC, called the BIOS. It's stored on a permanent storage chip on the motherboard. The BIOS is the very first program the CPU starts executing once it's powered up, and it only has a few jobs. Its main job is to scan the computer for internal hard drives or other storage media, and then look at the \"boot sector\" (a short block near the beginning) of those drives, to see if there's any OS code there to run. If there is, then it loads and runs that code, and that's how Windows or Linux or whatever starts running.",
"To explain it a different way, the installer itself acts as a temporary OS. The BIOS activates it and then it's able to build a more permanent one. Kinda like when they put up a construction crane, they build it as a small version, then use it to build itself up to full height. You need that temporary small OS with no features other than the ones needs to install a bigger OS to make said larger OS happen.",
"After the excellent answers, it only remains to say that BIOS means Basic Input/Output System",
"A full OS isn’t needed to install the OS. The installer program contains the necessary code for the computer to comprehend.",
"You insert a boot medium (optical disk, USB drive, SD card, whatever) and tell the computer to load that OS during its UEFI/BIOS startup. It is loaded into memory and runs the computer from there. You then use that to install the permanent OS on the computer's durable storage so you don't need the boot medium every time."
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ktsxmh | ; How do transition glasses work and why do they take so long to get back to normal after getting dark? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ginzrg5"
],
"text": [
"Photochromic lenses work because there are silver [cations]( URL_0 ) embedded in the lens. When these cations are exposed to UV light, a chemical reaction causes elemental silver to form. Because this silver is visible and less transparent, the lens darkens. The chemical reaction is reversed when UV light is not present. Because photochromic lenses don't work without UV light, indoor lighting will not cause them to change. Similarly, many people who first try photochromic lenses are surprised to find that they don't transition well while they're driving. This is because modern windshields are largely UV protected, and don't let enough UV light into the vehicle to change the lens. Many lens manufacturers now offer extra sensitive photochromic lenses that will work in the car, however, they can take longer to return to their clear state."
],
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ktv36b | Why is Bluetooth still so inconsistent in regards to connectivity and pairing previously paired devices? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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],
"text": [
"It's really nothing to do with inherent limitations of the technology, or with spectrum issues. A lot of devices have very good Bluetooth. It's mostly due to the fact that there are a buttload of devices using very cheap, poorly designed Bluetooth controllers, crappy antennas, and/or lousy software driver implementations. Consumers want Bluetooth connectivity (sometimes) and they want low prices. Very few consumers are going to research how good a device's Bluetooth connectivity is; it might even be hard to find such information. So some manufacturers just implement the cheapest hardware that they can get, and put minimal effort into the firmware. After all, you don't buy a refrigerator for its Bluetooth connectivity quality. You're also unlikely to return it because the Bluetooth is a piece of crap. It's like Ford back in the 60's figuring out that if they used cheaper bolts in their cars they could make millions of dollars in savings each year without noticeably driving off consumers. At least, not immediately. **TL;DR** - The race to the bottom."
],
"score": [
3
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|
ktxicj | why do banks not process your payments on the weekends? For example, if I make a rent payment on Friday, the money isn’t withdrawn from my account until Monday. If it’s all electronic, why can’t they process it the next day? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giomw9l"
],
"text": [
"In the U.S., the Federal Reserve is responsible for exchanging money between banks. They don't work weekends."
],
"score": [
13
],
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} | [
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|
ku1luz | How come PCs can render 100 FPS in gaming, but it takes so long to render a single frame in blender | Blender is a 3d animation software thingy idk the exact terminology | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gipdet8"
],
"text": [
"Because games are cheating to bring you \"good enough\" as fast as it can and try to avoid as much work as possible whereas software like Blender spend as much time as they need (when configured to do so) to render the scene in as realistic, accurate way as it can in as high quality as it is permitted. This is a very intense work when you don't allow any cheating."
],
"score": [
3
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} | [
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ku2kim | How does a computer create a 3D image? What are the inputs and how does the computer use them to output a 3D image for movies and video games? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gipqgl9"
],
"text": [
"well the short answer will be maths. lots and lots of maths. to elaborate a bit: let's say you want to draw a cube. you can describe it (store in a file) as a bunch of points - (0,0,0), (0,10,0), (10,0,0), and so on, where numbers correspond to the vertices' positions on the x, y, z axis respectively. if you want to draw it on a screen, like, maybe rotated or something, your software would need to perform some trigonometrical calculations in order to find out where the vertices of the cube \"land\" on the plane of the screen. it's all determined by the numbers. if you want to lit it up or something, you'll also have a bunch of numbers to specify how well the surface reflects the light, what color is it, etc. then you do some more calculations in order to find out how each place on the cube would look if it's being hit by rays from some given source of light, etc. that's what videocards are doing. lots and lots of calculations in order to find out how each piece would look eventually (i. e. what color to display on the screen... where the color is expressed by numbers and is calculated from some other numbers)"
],
"score": [
3
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|
ku3le3 | Why does Kelly Blue Book decide what every single car is worth?? Why does Kelly get to set the price of cars?? | How does she know? Who is Kelly? Is there some complex math equation involved? Why does no one question what the Kelly Blue Book worth of a car is? Why does everyone go by it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gipqe6n",
"giptgm4",
"gipqvh9"
],
"text": [
"They don't decide it. They collect data on the prices the cars are selling for and average it.",
"When you buy a car you have to get a title for it at your DMV/probate office/etc. They record the sales price and sell that data. KBB and other companies buy it. They then compile everything and know what 2018 Toyota Tacoma SEs are selling for in zip code 123XX. That's the price they are putting in their guide.",
"[This should help with part of this question.]( URL_0 ). As for the rest of it, KBB is a long running company who has assessed vehicles and their worth for the average consumer. However, KBB is not the end all of pricing, as it doesnt factor in absolutely every little detail. Hence the range of expected value."
],
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"https://tenor.com/view/kelly-guys-name-clerks2-sexy-stud-kinky-kelly-gif-16390066"
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} | [
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] | [
"url"
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ku5ghc | How does Google know I’m not a robot? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giq22n4"
],
"text": [
"well if it’s one of those buttons that just has “I’m not a robot” written on it, it tracks your mouse movement when you go to click on it. if it’s perfectly straight, you’re a robot. if it’s all wobbly then you’re a human."
],
"score": [
4
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|
kudyq0 | Why are modern televisions no longer making that static sound characteristic of older televisions? | You know when you touched the tv screen and it would make those little static “cracks”, why newer TVs don’t make that sound anymore? What’s the technology behind that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"girclzs"
],
"text": [
"Old style (cathode ray tube) TVs make the picture by firing a beam of electrons at the back of the screen which causes the phosphor coating to glow. This electron beam causes a static charge build-up which makes a tiny spark when you get your finger close to it. Newer TVs use a completely different type of technology that doesn't generally cause a static charge build-up."
],
"score": [
10
],
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} | [
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kujup5 | How is a shirt consisting of, say, 90% cotton and 10% some other material made? How do they "blend" the materials during the actual stitching process? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gisa92i",
"gisbjcp",
"githjtp",
"gisxvvj",
"gituuns"
],
"text": [
"They blend the materials during the thread making process, not during the shirt making process. So a thread is spun with a mix of fibers, and that thread is used to make fabric, and that fabric is cut and sewn into a shirt, for example. Different parts of the shirt, like the collar or sleeves, may use different fabric made of different blends too.",
"The way for the \"blending\" is done within the spinning of the the fiber that makes the cloth before it is used on the loom. It would be that at 90% cotton after every nineth strand of fiber would be a strand of polyester spun together to make the thread used to make the cloth.",
"It depends! Usually, the fibers are blended together before spinning into yarn/thread. Sometimes, like with stretch fibers such as elastane/spandex, the fibers are spun separately and plied together into one yarn/thread or held together while weaving or knitting. And sometimes, the other material is a coating required to be reported on consumer labeling, although there aren't too many of those. Trims and notions such as elastic aren't always included in the consumer labeling but when they are, they are often listed separately.",
"A clothing item can have different parts, which are not always blended. Your underwear has a rubber elastic in the waist, so it may be mostly cotton but a part of it is rubber or other elastic material. A good example is to look at a car. It can be 80% metal and 20% plastic, but they are not blended in any material sense.",
"Shirts are made of fabric, which is woven from thread. Thread is made by twisting little strands of fibers together so that the tension of the twisting keeps it together. When a shirt is made of a blend of fibers, that means that 90% of the fibers used to make the thread were cotton, and 10% were rayon for example. It does not mean \"9 cotton threads for every 1 rayon thread\", it means that every thread that makes the fabric is that same blend ratio. Sometimes, however the specific blend listed on a garment does not refer just to the fabric, but to the peice as a whole. For example, the fabric is 100% cotton and the embroidery on it is 100% rayon so overall the garment is 90% cotton and 10% rayon."
],
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139,
14,
8,
3,
3
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"text_urls": [
[],
[],
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|
kun1fy | What is open source software? What is open source in general? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gistawg",
"gistcba"
],
"text": [
"Open source means you make the code for a program available to anybody who wants it. They can look at it, see how it works, and if they want they can modify it and release their own version. This means you're very unlikely to make a lot of money from your software, but if people get interested in your thing, it can improve rapidly because of all the hands working on it.",
"So, let's say you write a program that helps calculate a family's budget. If someone else wants to use that program, they have to get your permission. They can't edit that program to make a different program that calculates a business's budget, or make their own version of the program that has new features. It's your program, and you own it. Likewise, the actual code that runs the program is your secret, and they would have to work hard to disassemble the program and figure out how it works. But many people have started doing something else. They are giving up the permission to their programs. They're saying \"I don't want to make money from this. I have enough. Instead, everyone has permission to do what they want with it. And I will show everyone the code so they can easily figure out how it works and use that to make their own programs, or make new additions to it. This program is free for everyone to use.\" These are \"open source\" software, because the source code is open for anyone to look at it. It's free to use. Many open source programs have projects where volunteers work to improve it, because they feel it's important and helpful for that program to be better."
],
"score": [
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5
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} | [
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|
kuo81x | Why can't you take out a hard drive (with bios lock) and just change the machine code of the hard drive to avoid the bios lock? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"git09hb",
"git0r4v"
],
"text": [
"The BIOS isn't stored on the hard drive. It's stored on the motherboard. Sometimes it is possible to remove the BIOS lock if you know what you're doing, but it's not neraly as easy as wiping a hard drive.",
"The hard drive and the BIOS are two different things. The BIOS is located on the motherboard, not the hard drive. It is possible to bypass a BIOS lock by resetting the motherboard back to its original factory settings. Simply disconnect power, remove the CMOS battery (that looks like a watch battery), wait 30 seconds and then put it everything back. A hard drive that has been encrypted (such as BitLocker) cannot be so easily bypassed, since the *entire contents of the hard drive* are encrypted and only the proper credentials can access the decryption keys to access the data."
],
"score": [
5,
5
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|
kur8es | Why smartphone SoC drivers have to be updated so the Android OS can also be updated? | I just read an article where Samsung explains why they don’t upgrade their phone’s OS more than twice and basically they said it’s because of Qualcomm and Mediatek not updating their SoC drivers more than 2 years so why old drivers stop working? Might not be applicable here but I believe you can use drivers made for old versions of Windows on the new version so why that’s not possible on Android? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gitw12o"
],
"text": [
"> Might not be applicable here but I believe you can use drivers made for old versions of Windows on the new version so why that’s not possible on Android? Simply put, you can't on Linux. Well, not out of the box. When there's a Linux Kernel update - as there always is when Android updates to a new major certain - you need to recompile your drivers from the source code. Often this can be done very easily without any actual new work being required (you can think of it kind of like printing out a new copy of a document that you have already written - you've done the hard bit, now you just need to hit print). The reason they don't simply get updated forever is because every now and then there will be a change in the Kernel which means you can't just re-compile - you may need to go in and actually change the code. Let's assume Qualcomm do this. Now Samsung need to test it with all the other drivers in the phone too, to make sure *they* compiled right, and to make sure they still all work nicely together. Except of course, Qualcomm might have made the SoC and they might have made the 4G chip, but they might not have made the flash drive or screen - so they'll need to get updated versions of those, too. But of course the SoC in question isn't just in one phone - it's in potentially hundreds, all of which have different configurations of other hardware and drivers that they need to make sure it works properly with. Even if they do this, they then have the problem of having to support many different users of many different versions of the OS and thus slightly different drivers - if Qualcomm find a bug, they now need to recompile a whole boat load of different driver versions, which then all have to be tested by Samsung *again* with all the other drivers. Eventually you end up with a situation where the gamut of potentially configurations is so wide that it's just not practical to keep updating them all, and from Samsung's point of view they'd rather just make a new phone and have you buy that instead. This is why Apple can support their devices for so long - they don't have many of them at any one time and they control almost everything in them and running on them. Google's Pixel line is similar but to a lesser degree. Ironically smaller companies have it easier, too, for the same reason. The massive companies with tons of phones are the ones in the really tricky situation."
],
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3
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kurxsa | How Windows time synchronization with server works? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gittg0s"
],
"text": [
"Several organizations maintain atomic clocks which are the most accurate timekeeping devices we have, and are used as \"primary standards\" which we as people agree is the official time. Every once in a while, provided you are connected to the internet, windows sends a request to a computer (server) that is synchronized with an atomic clock, asking what time it is, and changes the time on your computer to match. Your computer is not as good at keeping time, so it will desynchronize over several hours or days and need to be updated again."
],
"score": [
3
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"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
kuu15l | what do the numbers on the toaster mean? | i’m sitting here losing my mind because i think 4 means medium | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giu4okp",
"giu76sz"
],
"text": [
"Honestly, they are usually thrown together so cheaply that 4 just means more than 3 but less than 5. If you want to know the right toaster setting, toast bread, if it's too dark, turn it down, if it's too light, turn it up. Repeat until the toast looks right.",
"It's time, but it's not necessarily minutes. Five is longer than four, but it may or may not be 5 and 4 minutes."
],
"score": [
9,
4
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kuv9fi | How often do pilots interact with ATC mid-flight? | I understand that pilots liaise closely with Air Traffic Control during takeoff and landing but I was curious as to how often pilots converse with ATC while the aircraft is cruising at 30,000 feet? I stumbled across a map of European Air Traffic Control regions and it got me reminiscing about a flight I took last year across Europe. There are so many different national airspaces, I was wondering whether pilots confirm their presence when the plane enters a new airspace or not? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giubn1g",
"giulx0j"
],
"text": [
"As they enter different airspace that is controlled by different [TRACON]( URL_0 ) centers, they will announce their entry, and receive any necessary information. During their time in that airspace, they may be told to adjust course or altitude by the controller. When they're leaving that airspace, they'll be told what frequency to switch to in order to talk to the next controller for different airspace. Airliners travelling between cities will do this several times per flight, but a private pilot in a small propeller plane might not talk to anyone for long periods of time if they're just hanging out in one area. In particularly low-traffic areas, there may not even be a controller and pilots will just announce what they are doing on a certain frequency to make sure anyone else in the area knows what's going on, even for takeoff and landing.",
"It seems like your question has been answered but as an aside, there are times when a pilot wont talk with ATC at all, even during takeoff and landing. Some airports are what's called \"uncontrolled\". They don't have a tower and, while they do have airspace, pilots are pretty much free to come and go as they please. They use what's called a CTAF (Common Traffic Advisory Frequency) or UNICOM (Universal Communications) frequency to announce what they're doing and talk to any traffic in the area. Each airport will have a different frequency, and the pilots announce what they're doing at commonly recognized points, like turns, entering a traffic pattern, taxi, takeoff, landing, etc. These would be small propeller planes though, not big passenger jets. Source: I did most of my flight training for my private pilot license at an uncontrolled airport and was super, super nervous the first time I had to talk to ATC."
],
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[
"https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/air_traffic_services/tracon/"
],
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} | [
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] | [
"url"
] |
kuvkrb | Difference between NAT vs ARP? | Seems like both protocols translate requests from a public facing IP (say from a router) to the device on the network that requested it. What's the difference, and when is one used over the other? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giudti7"
],
"text": [
"> both protocols translate requests from a public facing IP (say from a router) to the device on the network that requested it. This is wrong, actually. ARP is used within a network; NAT is used for cross-gateway (local network to Internet) traffic. The Address Resolution Protocol is how a computer determines another computer's MAC address (Media Access Control), and it applies within a local network (Ethernet cables and switches only; no routers, no gateways). *Edit for clarity: Here, I'm using the term \"router\" much more strictly than the consumer might. The router on your desk can do ARP, but that's because it's acting in an intra-LAN capacity when it does. In order for computer A to send a message to B, it needs to know its MAC address. If it doesn't have it in its local cache, it has to ask every computer it can see \"Hey, what MAC address goes with this IP address?\" NAT, on the other hand, is primarily used to defeat *IPv4 address exhaustion*. The router keeps track of what internal machine initiated a communication, and then maps the *port* contained in the outgoing packet to the computer's internal IP. Then, when it sees data coming in on that port, it knows to swap out the computer's internal IP before sending the data back."
],
"score": [
4
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} | [
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kuvqh0 | What are WhatsApp’s new terms and conditions and why is everyone freaking out about them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giuejdk"
],
"text": [
"It’s like having a best friend whom you once confided in, shared your photos and phone number with, and now that classmate is threatening you “I’m sharing your information with other friends of mine so that they can understand you better, if you dont like it, dont be my friend”."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
kuwdr9 | Where in the physical world do computers store information, and what physical form does said information take? When space is taken up on a hard drive, what exactly is happening? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giuhtsz",
"giui0ra",
"giuivpq"
],
"text": [
"Depends on the storage solution. For Hard drives for exemple, an head will place magnetic fields on a platter. Two possible polarities, so two possible data, 0 and 1. All data will always be written as 0 and 1, because that's what your computer understand. Because of those magnetic fields, you cannot bring a strong magnet close to an HDD without corrupting data.",
"> Where in the physical world do computers store information Computers store information in several places, actually, depending on what you mean. Contextually, I assume you mean \"when I save a file, where does it go?\" The answer is your *drives,* be they solid-state, magnetic, flash, or maybe optical. The physical form depends on the drive, too. Solid-state and flash drives represent data as buckets of electrons. A filled bucket is a 0, while an empty bucket is a 1. Magnetic drives store data in little places called \"domains,\" and represent 1s and 0s by which \"direction\" the domains are facing. CDs and DVDs store data in the series of pits and not-pits (or discolored vs not-discolored parts) on their underside, and represent a 1 as \"the surface has not changed\" and a 0 as \"the surface has changed\" (or the other way around, I'm not sure).",
"Think Etch-a-sketch. What happens there, is as you turn a dial, a stylus moves and shifts the dust inside to the surface. In that same vein, a hard drive simply flips magnets to represent it's state. With enough states, read a certain way, you can have a drawing on a etch-a-sketch, and similarly, on a hard drive you have a document. To directly address your three questions... 1. The location doesn't change for where the information is stored. The state of it changes, but it still takes the same physical mass. Look at a magnet. Flip it. It still takes the same space, but if you were looking top-down at it, the field would be N/S, which in a hard drive represents the two bit states. 2. The information is stored on a platter consisting of magnets arranged in different methods. There's CMR, and SMR, and they have their pros and cons, but is not relevent in this context. 3. Simply put, a head is flipping the states of the magnets on the platter really quickly, which when read, would correspond back to what the bits state. A common query is if saving files changes the weight of the disk. To this I ask you: When you flip a magnet over, and weigh it, does it suddenly weigh more/less? Rather grossly oversimplified, but should cover the general idea rather well."
],
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8,
6,
3
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|
kuwg47 | How do companies like namecheap and godaddy own the right to sell you domain names? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"giujghg"
],
"text": [
"They don't actually \"own\" the domains you're buying, they act more like brokers. They are known as Domain Name Registrars. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is basically in charge of the internet and the virtual \"space\" it allows others to occupy. Think of GoDaddy as a car dealership. They do not manufacture the cars, but they provide the transaction and support services so that you can buy one. You wouldn't go to a Toyota factory to buy a car - you'd go to a dealership. Registrars like GoDaddy, NameCheap, Squarespace, etc. are all just virtual brokers or dealerships that set aside a domain of your choice (if the name is available) and offer technical support, something the manufacturer (ICANN) does not. EDIT: it sometimes feels like a monopoly because there are some big established players, but anyone can start their own registrar the same way anyone can open their own car dealership. There's an application process and I'd imagine a sizable buy-in"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
kv2gz6 | Why does turning a device off, then turning it back on usually fix the problem with it? | Title | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"givpr0i",
"givlsl3",
"givlmuu",
"givluh4"
],
"text": [
"Imagine you were driving somewhere and you took a wrong turn. All of a sudden your directions are all wrong. You could try to backtrack your steps and undo what happened, but if you could just teleport back to your starting point and start all over again, that would be much simpler. It's similar with computers. Sometimes some bug in the application can cause something to happen that it isn't supposed to. That can have some cascading effects down the line, but restarting the application gives you a clean slate. Black box devices like a router are similar -- they're just computers running software after all. Instead of restarting the software, we just restart the whole thing.",
"A lot of info is temporarily stored in RAM. Random Access Memory. Turning a device off clears that RAM and any hung processes or does slowing it down (for the most part). When you start up a PC, whether laptop, desktop, tablet, phone, etc. They all use RAM in a similar fashion. Is a lot faster at reading and writing data, too, so resources for the OS are loaded to not put wear on the HDD. With SSDs and now PCIe connected SSDs, there's less reliance on RAM, but still necessary to function. You can close all the programs/apps in the world but nothing clears RAM like a full shutdown",
"Sometimes a device will encounter a problem that doesn’t necessarily bring up and error message, and even when it does, rebooting it puts the software back to a fresh condition so it can start again. The longer a device is on for, the more likely it is to have an issue and cause problems for the user. I’ve had phones where the BT system or the main radio died without a trace that anything was wrong other than I couldn’t connect. A reboot usually bring it back.",
"A computer is a complex set of things working together. Alongside it, many program start and stop over the duration you keep it turned on. Some program reserve memory here and there. And sometime, they don't clear their reservation properly later on (there are plenty of error that don't show, and usually they cause minor crash in the background leaving memory reserved while nobody else need it). As more and more small things go wrong, even if it's in the background, it can cause other issues. Eventually, some settings can lock themselves, and program can't manipulate things that are reserved somewhere else. Eventually your computer throw visible error because it cannot handle these error in the background. Restarting the computer clear the memory and make it start over. You ahve no background task stuck, you have no memery stuck."
],
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18,
13,
3
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} | [
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