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67vdz7 | PC games typically allow custom key mapping for every in-game action, however console games typically only offer developer-created control schemes that do not allow for key remapping. Why do most console games only offer this type of limited customization? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Consoles generally thrive on uniformity and ease of use, much like iOS vs Android. Allowing the player to modify control settings seems like an obvious choice, but it can also be a bad thing at times. Players might not ever settle on a control scheme, but instead move from config to config until they're tired of the game and give up. Or, the players could be disallowed from changing the config and just have to \"get used to it\" which is actually an easier thing than finding the optimal layout in many cases. So, devs take the route that's easiest for them (no worrying about allowing control rebinding) and usually easiest for their players (a set of control choices that covers the top 50% or so of player needs). And the control choices offered by devs are often long-time favorites of the community that are easily transferable between games for faster learning. (like CoD and Halo are both shooters and have the same basic control scheme) But the XBox One is challenging this a little bit... They've added (in the system settings) the ability to remap the buttons that the system sends to the game, which bypasses game devs allowing you to remap entirely. This system (while mildly clunky) puts control back in the player's hands, and makes customization possible again.",
"I've developed PC games with custom key mapping, and games with locked controls so I may be able to offer some insight here. Here's an example: Imagine playing Super Mario Brothers on a [NES controller]( URL_0 ) A is the jump button, and B is the run button. In Super Mario, you need to be able to jump **while** you are running. But that's ok, because the control scheme makes this easy. If you are holding B (Run) with the tip of your thumb, your lower-thumb is positioned perfectly over the A (Jump) button. So all you would need while holding the run button, is move your thumb so that you are pressing both buttons simultaneously. There is no need to let go of the run button to be able to press A. It works great and feels completely natural. Now imagine that Super Mario Brothers allowed button remapping from the get-go. Some players would inevitably switch the buttons for running and jumping before they even started playing. It may lead to frustration when players can't make jumps because they have to stop running to hit the jump button. And if they never experienced the benefits of the original control scheme, they may just mistake this problem for bad game design. With locked controls, you can ensure that users will be able to get the intended gameplay experience and wont run into any control problems. On consoles, this always works because the controller is the same layout for everyone. However, on PC, the keyboard/mouse/controller may be vastly different between users, so the developer is forced to add custom controls even if they don't want to, just to ensure that everyone can play regardless of their computer set-up."
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67vnkd | Why can't a smartphone split 50/50 its wifi and cellular data in times of weakness? Why does it have to be EITHER wifi OR cellular data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's possible to do, there's a few challenges. First of all, both your wifi and cellular interfaces will have different IP addresses, this means that for any connection that needs to maintain a conversation, it will only be able to do so with one of the two. Other kinds of connections, like http requests that aren't dependent on the session or state CAN use both interfaces to help speed up downloads etc. But you might also run into situations where there is an expectation that everything happens over one address, and that could cause technical issues too. But I think another real issue is expectation and billing. Most places charge very different for cellular data than residential internet packages. If you're at home watching youtube videos on your phone and your residential internet slows down, and your cellular data kicks in to keep you watching that stream in full 1080p without you realizing it, you might end up with unexpected data charges. It's a lot easier conceptually (and technically) to just switch to one network or the other for all data.",
"Actually this option is now available on smartphones. If the wifi signal is weak your smartphone starts taking help from your data package. For IOS: Goto settings - > mobile data - > scroll to the bottom and turn on 'Wifi Assist' For android: Most cells have a setting called Smart Network Switch, it is probably under your WiFi settings. It uses both WiFi and your 4g connection. But it also depends on phone. (had no idea about android before this. answer copied from u/Photographer_Rob)",
"It does actually. Most cells have a setting called Smart Network Switch, it is probably under your WiFi settings. It uses both WiFi and your 4g connection. But it also depends on phone. It is an option for androids, but I don't know if Iphones do it.",
"Generally speaking, this technology has been available for a while. Initially though, many manufacturers or carriers turn it off by default. They don't want less savvy users kicking in their doors, furious that they've burned through their data while on WiFi.",
"They are two different physical devices, one radio for WiFi signals, another radio for cell signals. They speak in different languages, and would have to decide between themselves which 50% of traffic each will handle. The signals also wouldn't reach the phone simultaneously, so there would be a delay while it builds a buffer. Your phone uses them both, but not simultaneously; it switches back and forth. It's very hard to ELI5, but imagine you are holding a walkie talkie in one hand, and phone in the other. The person you are talking to speaks German into the walkie talkie, and Italian into the phone. They switch between the phone and walkie talkie while they're speaking, sometimes saying the first half of a word in German into the walkie talkie, and the second half in Italian into the phone, and sometimes you hear the last part of the word before the first part. How hard would it be to actually understand that conversation? Edit: source: former DevOps engineer for the R & D department of the largest mobile semi-conductor company. Edit 2: The functionality everyone is saying currently exists is analogous to holding only the walkie talkie or phone, putting one down when picking the other up. OP is asking why we can't hold both up, one to each ear.",
"The S6 has a download booster you can turn on that enables this function. Also any Android can turn this on in developer settings",
"It's called [LWA]( URL_0 ) and it's coming. Basically the Industry has a bunch of challenges: - Hardware - requires a smart, power hungry chip in the device - Software - needs also to be smart and user-agnostic - Licensing - big money in these technologies. Fights ensue (see Everyone vs Qualcomm) - Network - need backend to know what's going on on the device So all these manufacturers (Apple, Samsung) and infrastructure vendors (Ericsson, Huawei), chipset makers (Qualcomm, Intel), and network service providers (AT & T, China Mobile) get together with the standards body (3GPP) and argue for years over what the \"customer\" needs. Then they publish a standard (e.g. 3GPP Rel. 13) and sanction what everyone ALLOWED to do. Then 12-18 months later, 1-2 network vendors deploy 1-2 live networks in 1-2 service providers that 1-2 OEMs support. Then there's a waterfall effect that rolls out more broadly, and by that time the next release is out and a new standard is being chased. TL;DR money+time = everything happens eventually. Also, for everyone saying \"smart network switch\" - that's definitely not it. That is a \"switching\" and it's a marketing deal developed by Samsung & Qualcomm. Simultaneous (50/50) is only possible through Aggregation, and is only a Rel. 12 and Rel. 13 feature (2016 and beyond). Several have pointed out that there are two radios and therefore only one can be active at a time. This is true, but again, only up until 2016 when the Aggregation standards were published to combine the radio frequencies.",
"I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the Galaxy S5 had a feature called \"Download Booster\" that did exactly what OP is describing. Unfortunately, it was disabled on all US carriers except for T-Mobile. I'm not sure if this feature remained in subsequent Samsung flagships, but the technology OP wants has been used on a commercially available product before.",
"Companies like Republic Wireless build into their phones hardware for connection flipping - seems to work pretty well. Not like how wi-fi works when going from one access point to the next. Originally that was supposed to be seamless too.",
"As others have said already. Smartphones actually have such a feature. I just recently found it on my Galaxy S6.",
"My Galaxy S7 from T-mobile can do this. It's called WiFi booster. It uses both connections to speed up your up/down speeds.",
"Weirdly I just happened to see a setting for this . iPhone 7 plus on att , has a setting to supplement weak wifi with cellular . Isn't it weird how when you find something new it starts popping up everywhere ? Hah",
"It is *possible* but it's sort of like if you wanted to watch a movie faster, so you set it up to play half of the scenes on one TV and half on another. You can't really follow them both at the same time, so you watch one and your friend watches the other. 45 minutes later, the whole movie has been watched, but neither of you has the whole picture. Also, without working things out in advance, you both might have picked some of the same scenes to watch and some might have been missed altogether. Even if you perfectly divided the movie, you now have to sit down afterwards and discuss it to make sure you have the whole story. Depending on the complexity of the plot, this could take awhile. So, it *can* work, but often the extra effort and programming that goes into it isn't worth it."
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67vwv3 | How can TOR protect my browsing history from my ISP now that browsing history is for sale, if my ISP knows I'm sending traffic through TOR? | I get that TOR is not super secure for illegal stuff - I don't want to do illegal stuff. However, I've read that TOR might help you mask your browsing history from your ISP so you can watch two girls go down on one another in peace. However, it would seem that since my ISP is the one providing me access to the internet - if I type in URL_0 into a TOR browser - wouldn't my ISP know I'm watching pornhub? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tor uses something called \"onion routing\" which involves multiple layers of encryption being wrapped around what your computer sends out, which are then removed one at a time as your message makes its journey. So I'm going to use a letter analogy, because it's easier to explain. You want to get a package from pornhub. So you write a message and stick it in an envelope addressed to pornhub. Alice, Bob and Charles have agreed that they'll forward mail if anyone sends it to them. So you take the \"pornhub\" envelope and stick it in an evelope addressed to \"Alice\". You take the \"Alice\" envelope and stick it in an envelope addressed to \"Bob\", and you stick that in an envelope addressed to \"Charles\". So your when you actually mail your letter your mailman (i.e. your ISP) only sees a letter addressed to Charles. On the other end of the chain, Alice knows mail is being sent to pornhub but doesn't have a clue who you are. This is basically how TOR works, since each person in the chain only knows who they got the message from, and who to send it to they can't connect the origin and destination on their own. The encryption works to prevent people from opening the letters they are not supposed to.",
"An ISP does not directly know your browsing history. Think of it more like a post office. A post office works by sending letters and packets to their destination. This is just how an ISP works but with digital packets. To do this they only need to read the address on the packet. To make sure the packet is not tampered with and that nobody can read it you usually seal the packet. And you can encrypt data to keep your digital communication confidential. However the post office and the ISP still needs to know the address you want to send the packet to. The way TOR gets around this is by having you put your packet inside another packet inside another packet inside another packet. Now when you send a packet the post office only knows the address of the first TOR node. When the TOR node gets your packet he opens up the outer layer and sends it back to the post office. By going though three different TOR nodes it gets pretty hard to figure out where the packet came from originally. When an answer comes back it goes though the same TOR nodes who then adds another packet and sends it back closer to you until you get the packet you wanted. So your ISP does not know what websites you use. The most they can figure out is that you are communicating though TOR and how much and when you do this."
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67w5r8 | How does a password get hashed? | I know what a hash is. It turns a password into a string of numbers and letters to protect it from hackers but how are those numbers and letters decided? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Using a hashing algorithm. There are plenty of them in existence and each works differently than the next, so if you want a specific answer you should look up the hashing information in question (f.i Sha256). A super simplified hashing algorithm would for instance be \"sum together the position of each letter in the alphabet together\" So, \"ALLIANCE\" might be \"A+L+L+I+A+N+C+E\" = \"1 +12+12+9+1+14+3+5\" = 57. Of course a good, secure algorithm is much more complicated than that and is a bit outside the range of ELi5, but it is something like that: Use some process to get a fingerprint of the data."
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67wdq5 | Why do mobile websites make me click to show the full article? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most mobile websites are built for speed - they'll generate just as much content as they need to so you get the page immediately. Abandon rates (when you leave the page) are very high when pages don't load quickly. There are also metrics that people only tend to read a small portion of any given article - it gives additional view into when users are reading the complete article versus just the first paragraph."
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67x45p | Lotion. How does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thin film on the surface of the skin to prevent loss of moisture. humectants: these attract water vapor from the air to moisturize the skin. Restoration of deficient materials these are more complex and try to restore natural moisturizing factors on the skin such as Amino lipids"
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67x8uk | Why are the latest phones upwards of $700-$800, while the latest tablets are only around $200-$300 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fitting the complexity of a phone into a body of its size is much harder than to fit basically the same internals into a device 4-6x the size. Also, phones typically are the more cutting edge technology and focus of innovation due to their larger sales number and regular update cycle, while tablets then benefit from the trickle down of technology. Even so, the top tablets and top phones aren't quite as far apart in price as you suggest... the iPad Pro runs $600+ and there are cheaper smart phones from brands other than Apple or Samsung's top end.",
"When talking about pricing your first thought should always be: What are people willing to pay? Normal users use their smart phones around a high 2 digit number or a low 3 digit number per day (lets say 80 times a day). A normal tablet user uses her/his tablet maybe 3 times a day. Additionally most people see smart phones as a basic need while a tablet is some kind of extra/luxury/comfort thing you do not need that much as a smart phone. That's why people are willing to pay more for a smart phone than a tablet.",
"I think you are overgeneralizing a bit, there are definitely tablets out there that can cost just as much as a phone. It all depends on what features each product has. An iphone with hundreds of gigs of storage it definitely going to cost more than some off-brand tablet with only 32 gb of storage. Likewise you can also find cheaper phones out there compared to more high end tablets. But lets say, for the sake of argument, your generalization is true. It could easily be explalined by supply and demand. Cell phone have a much larger user base than tablets, pretty much everyone owns a cell phone. This isn't as true for tablets. So the price would be higher based upon the higher demand.",
"It's not really a fair comparison, $700-800 is the cost of a flagship phone but there are plenty of more affordable phones in the $200-300 range, and tablets can range from $150 Nexus tablets to $900 iPads."
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67yl7a | Hard Drives: How do the read/write heads read/write data on the platters if its spinning so fast? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To us it's spinning fast, but the integrated circuit processors that control the position of the heads and the platters are much faster, and can keep track of when to start and when to stop writing. Hard drive access time is 9-15 milliseconds (how long it takes to move the heads and start reading / writing), but the memory and processors on the hard drive itself can work about 200 times faster than that (they can process 200 commands in the time it takes the head to move to one location)."
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67yo4o | How is korea able to have the fastest internet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They put fiber into the home, rather than the cabinet. In the UK we have fiber to the cabinet (fttc) the last hop is made over the existing , and usually old copper phone lines. The south Koreans put fiber connections right up to the homes , so they have the ability to obtain really fast connections. Cost is a factor, I'm assuming it's pretty cheap for a connection in S.Korea, also I believe the government subsidies this",
"South Korea is a rich, highly developed, well educated country with one of the highest urbanization rates in the world. Their dense, centralized population makes its it more economical to build good digital infrastructure. To put it into perspective, it is less than half the size of the US state of Wyoming, with about 100 times more potential customers.",
"* Population of South Korea is ~50 million. * South Korea is a small country, so population density is 519 people/sq km * Furthermore, Seoul, the capital, has ~10 million of those people and the population density there is 10,400/sq km, which about half the density of Manhattan. All of South Korea is about 3 times the size of the New York City metropolitan area. So imagine if your whole country was just New York City and the surrounding area (Long Island, etc.) plus a little bit of surrounding countryside. This makes it easier to have any kind of development reach a large number of people with less effort than in a more spread out place (say, Texas). Now, right when the Internet is changing from a small network mostly used by scientists and governments, into a world-wide public communication system, [your government decides to move development from industry and production to education and computing, so you invest a huge amount of money into building up your internet access]( URL_0 ). TL;DR Geography + a deliberate decision by the government to have good internet."
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67zujj | How do road painters ensure that road markings are perfectly aligned? | Not sure if this is a technology related flair, but I always wondered how.. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on the type of road. On city streets usually by measuring and making marks the length of the road. Once the marks are there it takes someone with experience to make adjustments based off of the position of the marks and the reality of how it will look. On highways/freeways its kind of the same idea, but they will usually use a truck and camera that does the measuring...but there will still be the guy with experience to make sure it looks good."
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6807li | Why does it take so long to download something but such a short amount of time to delete it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you download something every individual byte of information has to travel down the line to your computer. So it has to sent that amount of information. For example maybe say 40 Gigabytes all down the line to your computer. When you delete that information you dont remove that 40Gb what happens is the computer tells itself it can overwrite that information. It's actually still there and can be recovered.",
"Downloading a file is like delivering a bunch of furniture. Deleting a file is like pretending the furniture doesn't exist."
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6813iu | What is Linux/Unix (in under 3 sentences?) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Linux is an operating system, like Windows or osx, but it's open source. It means everyone can contribute to it, fixing bugs, improving security etc. Because of this it's free, and in my experience very versatile, and it's pretty awesome. There's much more to it than that, but I just had 3 sentences.",
"Unix is an old operating system like Microsoft's Windows. Linux is an OS built to work like Unix without violating any copy right in the process. Linux is free and everyone can make their own version of it as long as it stays free."
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682u86 | How is it ensured that Wikipedia articles show correct information, and how is vandalism of articles prevented on it? | Are there some people who monitor certain articles at all times, or what? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's no iron-clad guarantee that all of the information on Wikipedia is accurate. The prevailing pattern however is that there are more benevolent people adding correct information than vandals intentionally adding incorrect information. Some people take a personal attachment to certain articles and set up notifications that will email them whenever there is a change. Because of this, most popular articles are fixed within minutes of vandalization. But, that still doesn't mean that incorrect information can't slip through if done more subtly."
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6833w7 | How does Google's reCAPTCHA work on mobile devices where there is no cursor being tracked? | Edit: Another question: could a bot pretend to be a mobile device and get past reCAPTCHA? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"reCAPTCHA keeps track of a lot of stuff like time between touches, position of the touch, time pressed, etc. It just analyzes it in his own way. > Could a bot pretend to be a mobile device and get past reCAPTCHA? They could pretend to be mobile, but they would fail the captcha. My SmartTV works with a mobile browser and it still asks for Captcha everytime I go to a website. It even asks me for the catcha again when I'm changing episodes (not terminating session)."
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684r69 | how is reddit's search engine so bad? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As I understand it, modern internet search engines tend to take advantage of links and user behavior in order to come up with top results. So, for example, Google can organize results not just by keyword hits and tricks relating to how the words are used on the page, but also look at how many people who run similar searches actually click on each choice and rank choices by how many other websites link back to them. The last one---I'm told---was the big Google breakthrough that made it so much better than other searches. Effectively, Google and other similar internet searches are piggybacking on the work done by all the people who are actually reading the possible responses and figuring out which one's are actually good. Reddit, on the other hand, can't have that, since posts don't link to other posts (at least not in any meaningful way). It can return things with the same keywords and let you play with their upvotes and comments and such, but there's no good shortcut to the best responses.",
"Search engines are very hard to make. Not only do they need very powerful computers, but they also need very efficient software to run quickly. In a way, it's less that reddit's search is so bad, and more that Google's search is so good. I'd say reddit's search is pretty decent compared to 90's search engines like AltaVista, AskJeeves, Magellan, etc. On top of this, reddit's focus isn't search, but on content aggregation. It's more important for reddit to rank posts in terms of popularity than to be able to find any post at all. For this reason, they haven't made it a priority to make the best search tools. Which is probably smart - if they wanted to make a search that doesn't seem bad, then they have to perform similar to Google, which would require an enormous commitment of resources with a fairly minimal return on investment."
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6856il | Why do GIFs take longer to load than Youtube videos? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"YouTube videos can start playing immediately while the later part of the video is still loading while gifs require the entire gif to load before it's played. Also a good video encoder achieves greater compression than a gif.",
"Because gifs are larger (in terms of file size) compared to a video of the same resolution and length. A **lot** larger. A video stores the full image for the first frame (called a key frame), and then only stores the changes from one frame to the next for most of the remaining frames (called delta frames), with an occasional key frame thrown in when the video changes a lot between frames. But gif files were never intended to show videos. They were intended for tiny animated elements on websites. So they store *every* frame as a key frame, which requires a lot more data."
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685hm8 | How does a proxy server actually work (its inner-workings)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Like any other server, more or less. The simplified version is that, assume I want to connect to URL_0 , but I don't want anyone to know. So, I go to the Proxy server and tell it \"Give me access to URL_1 \". The proxy server then goes and visits URL_1 , get's the website, and sends it back to me. Anyone trying to spy on me only sees that I sent a request to the proxy and that the proxy sent something back: as opposed seeing that I was visiting URL_1 ."
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687rcb | Why have usually US semi trucks "nose" compared to European flat cabin semis? | It doesn't make sense to me especially considering fuel efficiency, since gas in US is cheaper and those with nose should be more aerodynamic. Or the ones with nose are more dangerous for other cars and US doesn't have so strict safety requirements? Or US has lower requirements on length of truck so they can waste space on nose? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"European roads were often designed for horse and wagon, not industrial vehicles. That means they are small and hard to maneuver in. As such they have to greatly limit the size of vehicles so they can maneuver. The US does not have this limitation often as we designed most of our cities after the invention of the automobile and our road tend to be wider. Safety requirements are as strict here, but our roads allow for longer vehicles to operate safely. In fact it is not uncommon for trucks to carry multiple trailers connected into something that looks somewhat like a train here in the US.",
"> Or US has lower requirements on length of truck so they can waste space on nose? This, most of all. In Europe, the total length of a truck is limited to 18.75 meters, while in the USA, length limits apply only to the trailer, not the tractor unit. Aerodynamics aren't really a factor, the physics are complex and \"blunt\" shapes can actually be quite aerodynamic."
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688buq | What is SDK?What is API? | Hello friends I would like to know what is SDK and what is an API and how they related or the difference between them. P.S. Noob question. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you walk into McDonalds, you can order a happy meal & get a nice pre-packaged meal (Burger, fries, toy, etc). But say you wanted to walk into the kitchen and make your own meal - you'd still have to use the ingredients the store has. You can't walk into McD & make a Taco Supreme as part of your meal - it doesn't make sense in their context, they don't know what to do with it. The SDK & API is like the menu at mcdonalds. The SDK is the collection of tools & resources you need to build a meal. The API is the list of things you can ask the SDK to do for you - if you ask the McDonalds API for 'slivered onions' it knows how to deliver - whereas the Taco Bell API would have no idea what the hell that means. If you don't like what the McDonalds SDK has to offer. You want waffle fries. You can go closer to basics & use the bare Grocery Store SDK. It's a lot more flexible & you can build more, but you're gonna have to do a lot of the basic development yourself that the SDK had pre-packaged for you, like cutting up the potatoes for fries, not to mention the tomatoes and onions etc. And if you wanted to go really crazy you could ditch the Grocery Store SDK & go all the way back to the Subsistence Farming - the Assembly Language of making meals. But now you're talking about growing your own vegetables & slaughtering your own cow - you got a LOT of work ahead of you before you get to that burger. It's an imperfect analogy, but hopefully gives you an idea",
"SDK stands for Software Development Kit.Which means a platform where you can develop a software within a software/workspace. and API is Application program interface which is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API specifies how software components should interact.",
"As u/s0cket_err0r said, SDK is software development kit (the things you use to create your program) API is application program interface (the things you use in your program). Let's consider simple hello world program. using System; namespace helloWorld { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(\"Hello World!\"); } } } in this program the function WriteLine() is part of API libraries. It is a function you use in program to do a thing. To make this into a real program, open text editor paste in this short example and save it as lets say URL_0 Then open command prompt in the directory where you saved the URL_0 file and write csc URL_0 csc is part of the SDK. You would have to have it correctly set up, which I won't explain here, but basically this tells the computer to take your URL_0 file and give it to this csc program to do its thing. csc will create helloWorld.exe which you can run. helloWorld.exe internally uses the API libraries (it needs those to be present on the computer) and it no longer needs the SDK to run. In reality SDK consists of much more than just the compiler, i. e. debugger or IDE or profiling tools.",
"An SDK is a *software development kit* and API stands for application *application programming interface*. You can think of an SDK of a box of tools to help you work with a particular product. One of the tools in that box may or may not involve some pre-built stuff for the API pf the product. An API is just way for programs to talk with each other, it is a predefined list of commands or queries that can be sent to the program in some way and an explanation of what the answers mean. If you want to built your own product to interact with someone elses software you either need to know exactly how the software works on the inside and hope they never ever change anything (this does not really work in real life) or you need access to the API. Many software makers release the full documentation on the API on their products to the public or select parts of the public to give them the ability to make programs that work with their software. Sometimes they go a bit father and release some pre-written libraries of commands to use that API, so that every developer who wants to work with it doesn't have to rewrite everything from scratch. Those libraries may be part of a software development kit. The SDK may also include other tools to help you write software for their product."
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688f4v | What does the f/stop in a camera do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Building on the other two responses... The F/stop works with the shutter speed to get the appropriate amount of light on the film. The smaller the F/stop number, the more light is being let in at once, and the larger fraction on the shutter speed, the longer time the light is allowed to reach the film. So if you turn the F/stop up (closing the aperture more) you need to turn the shutter speed down to keep the same amount of light on the film (the same exposure). And if you turn the shutter speed up, you need to turn the F/stop down (opening the aperture) to keep the same exposure. For fast moving objects, you'll want a fast shutter speed to cut down on blur, so that means you'll need a wide open aperture to match. But the more open the aperture, the shallower depth of field you have. Depth of field is how far in front of and behind what you're focusing on is also in focus. If you have a very shallow depth of field, pretty much only the specific thing you're focusing on is sharp; everything else is fuzzy. If you have a deep depth of field, things are in focus for a long distance before and behind your subject. So you need to decide how much you want in focus for how big you want your aperture, which affects the shutter speed you need. And you have to take into account how fast you need to take your picture for motion blur, which affects the F/stop you can use. It can be a frustrating dance.",
"when you take a picture there are two things you need to tell the picture to do. how long to keep the lenses open and how much light to let into the camera. F/stop tells your camera how much light to let in",
"It determines the size of the aperture which then, along with the shutter speed determines how much light reaches the film or sensor. A larger number means a smaller aperture, which means less light, but also a wider depth of field (how much of the image is in focus)"
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689ih3 | what happens to a file when it is uninstalled from a computer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We tend to say the file is deleted. The computer has a disk that acts like a like a filing cabinet. The computer keeps a list or table that tells it where the files is stored on the disk - similar to which draw on hanger in the filing cabinet. So the table might say - file1 is stored at address 100 and is 40 pages long, and file 2 is stored at address 140 and is 50 pages long, file 3 is stored at address 190 and so on. If you ask the computer to delete file 2 then it will just delete the name of the file from the table. After deleting the file the table might be - file1 is stored at address 100 and is 40 pages long and file 3 is stored at address 190. So the file is still on the disk but the computer cannot find it from the table anymore. Next time a file is to be saved it might put it in the space the file 2 is using. If say file 4 is also 50 pages long then the computer might use the space file 2 uses and the table might be - file1 is stored at address 100 and is 40 pages long, and file 4 is stored at address 140 and is 50 pages long, file 3 is stored at address 190. File 2 has then been overwritten. Unlike real files the file on a computer is a row of switches that can be set to 0 or 1. When a new file needs to use the row of switches they are just switched to the new values. Hope my analogy helps and doesn't confuse - the main point is that in most systems the file is not deleted, the index is deleted, and the space reused. There are also other ways for the computer to manage the disk.",
"Your computer saves things by changing the ones and zeroes on disk. It doesn't matter what those bits were before you saved something, so there is no such thing as \"empty\" memory. As such, there's no point in \"deleting\" anything, as it would be equivalent to just saving random bits on top of the old ones. Instead of actually removing the data from the disk the computer just marks that part as free. Eventually, when something needs to be saved again, those bits might be used."
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68afke | Serverless Computing | I hear all the IT folks saying that Serverless Computing is the future. I'm all confused. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Essentially it's a model where you no longer need to care which server your code is running on, making it entirely someone else's problem. In a traditional model, you buy a big computer, screw it into a rack, and its yours to look after. Perhaps you rent it instead of buying, and perhaps the company you rent from takes care of replacing any faulty hardware, but deciding how many servers you need and how powerful they need to be is still basically your problem. If you want more or fewer servers, your provider can probably help but you're probably committed to renting for at least a month at a time. Cloud models are still essentially renting servers, but they streamline and automate the process of adding or removing servers. Rather than calling the provider's helpdesk to arrange setting up a new server next week, your code can make a request to their code asking for new servers or for servers to be turned off. A few minutes later you have a new server, and you pay by the hour for just what you need. However, while the servers are running, everything on them is still your problem. You still need to install updates for the operating system and other software, and come up with rules for when and how the number of servers should change. You still need to keep some spare capacity around because it'll still take several minutes to get more servers up and running if there's a sudden spike in traffic/demand. Serverless models move away from renting a server, even by the hour, and effectively to renting computing power as you need it. Rather than the provider giving you a server to run your code on, you give them your code and they worry about where it should run. Maybe you have some code that resizes images that your users have uploaded. You give the provider your code, and whenever you get a new image you just send it to the provider and say \"run my code over that and send me the result back\". They worry about how many servers they need and when, and sending your request to a server that's got some spare capacity right now."
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68b4lt | What's the deal with Google Inc and Alphabet Inc? Why a holding company? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It breaks up the financial burdens and responsibilites of the company making it possible for the company to engage in outside endeavours without endangering its core products. Google is Google. However Google is becoming so big, that they can't manage everything under the Google branding without some level of additional headroom to cover everything, especially logistics for a company with 70 different departments. So Alphabet controls its lesser products and R & D that has developed over the past few years that doesn't deal with the core product of Google. Things like Google Docs, Google Search Engine, Google Adwords... those are all still under the Google brand name. However, products like Google Glasses for example, are lesser quality products that didnt take off, yet still provide a revenue base and need support. Thus, financial resources don't get diverted from the main company directly for Google Glasses, and legal concerns also stop with Alphabet Holdings instead of Google having to deal with it personally for every single project."
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68ekfu | How can everybody's internet go through the same fiber optic cable at the same time? | I get that bits of data are transferred through fiber optic cables as pulses of light. How can the bits of a certain person not mix with another's? -------------------------------------- edit: Thanks for the great replies everyone. I can summarize what everyone said as follows: 1- Data are sent as packets of bits, each having the sender and receiver address included. These packets are a predetermined length of digital signals or predetermined format. That's how different packets not mix with each other. 2- Packets take turns going through the same channel, not being transmitted at the same time. It is just so fast that we perceive it to do so. 3- Fiber optic cables have numerous fibers in them, each single fiber can have different communications channels with each being a different frequency of light (thousands). 4- This means that an optic fiber is a very very large highway containing thousands of lanes (wave lengths), in each lane data of different people can travel sequentially as very fast cars (discreet packets of data). One optic fiber cable contains many of these super massive highways. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"How do all the letters in the mailman's bag don't get mixed up? They are each in an envelope with a sender and recipient address.",
"Whether it's fibre optic or copper doesn't really matter. Whenever you visit a web page, for instance, the data you send and receive is cut up into little pieces (packets). Each packet, much like a letter, has a destination address. These packets are sent from your computer to the nearest router. The router inspects the address and figures out where to send the packet to. The next router along the path does the same thing, and the next one, until the packet reaches its destination. Along that route, the packet will sometimes travel across a copper wire, a fibre optic cable, or maybe even some kind of wireless link. The point here is that it doesn't batter how the packet is sent. What matters is that the internet is reliable enough that most of these packets arrive at their destination in a timely manner. For the most part, these packets are sent and moved one after another. Just like on a highway, there are many packets in a row all going roughly the same direction. Some might take a turn and get off that highway to go elsewhere. Some highways have mutiple lanes, meaning that several packets (or cars) can be roughly in the same place at the same time. This is accomplished, for instance, by transmitting different \"lanes\" in different colours. This too is pretty much technology independent. You can send multiple signals along a copper wire, or a fibre optic cable or through the ether. If you think that's magical, then try to think about cable TV: you have many channels on cable TV, but only one cable. It's the same thing as \"everybody's internet\" going through one fibre optic cable. This is called *multiplexing*.",
"Modern fiber cables can contain up to a thousand fibers in a single cable. And often times we have many cables packed together into a larger cable, though those are mostly underground.",
"Because all the data is not sent at truly the same time. They are sent in chunks (packets) one after the other. Each packet has a header which contains the length, destination address, source address and so on. So the router knows “the next 50 bytes should go to the address 123.123.123.13” and sends it there."
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68gii3 | why were tv and movies black and white? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the technology of how to create black and white photographs and moving pictures came first. Television at first was black and white too even though color movies already existed at that point. The technology to make color-tv was more expensive than b & w tv and the receivers for color were also more expensive. During the early phase of adoption they had to add color information in such a way as to not break anything for people with b & w tvs while allowing those with expensive new color tvs to get a color picture from the same signal. During the phase before it became normal some producers would create and broadcast shows in b & w despite color being available because it was cheaper to do so and not many would have the color receivers to see the difference.",
"Your eyes perceive color by sensing varying combinations of red, green, and blue light. To reproduce this for film originally required three separate strips of film to capture the image in each of those colors that had to then be assembled into a single strip for a projector. It took a while to figure out how to do that, to find the right photosensitive chemical dyes, and how to assemble the colors into a single film. B & W was just cheaper and easier. Color film was available for decades before it became the standard, but it was reserved for epic productions because of the expense. *Gone With the Wind* wasn't even the first color movie, but it came out in 1939 and still B & W was common well into the 1960's."
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68gikh | Why does Facebook feel the need to constantly switch the feed from "Most Recent" to "Top Stories?" It happens several times a day. How do they benefit from this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I can't stand \"top stories\". If I wanted to know what people were doing 3 days ago, I would've gotten on FB 3 days ago.",
"The reason facebook (and other social media) do this is to make the feed seem more active. If every time people check facebook they are seeing different posts it makes it seem like more is happening. This encourages people to keep coming back and checking the feed. I also hate this as it makes all kind of other problems, like trying to find an older post, but that is the reason they do it."
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68ip2j | Why are projector screens white instead of black? Wouldn't a black screen provide more contrast in all light conditions? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If they were black, they would absorb all of the light shined on them. The projector projects light, which is how it displays things. If the screen was black, you wouldn't see any of the projector's image. The screen needs to be white so that any of the light the projector shines can be reflected off of the surface of the screen and thus enter our eyes and be detected.",
"A black screen would reflect almost none of the projected image, so it would have almost no contrast at all. You want as much of the projected light reflected back as possible, without going too far and trying to project onto a mirrored surface."
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68j1ab | Why can my cellphone play high quality 3d games with a QHD display but my laptop struggles with better hardware and lower resolution? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your laptop is a rocket ship compared to your phone's being a bicycle. Your laptop could demolishly play any game on your phone But those makers dont make that game for the laptop, they make it for phone, if they made the same game for a laptop, it would play just fine.",
"The 3D games your phone can play would not look \"high quality\" on a much-larger laptop screen. The image on a phone is small enough that game designers can greatly reduce polygon count and texture quality without it being noticeable."
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68jup4 | why do phone batteries last longer in the cold, but suffer no battery loss in heat? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If batteries last longer cold then wouldn't then suffer batter loss while hot by definition? I mean if the batter lasts X minutes cold then it would last something less than X while warm. That is battery loss..."
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68mjv6 | Why do you need a ";" at the end of each line of code? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's sort of like a period at the end of the sentence. Not strictly necessary in most cases, necessary in a small number, but in general really helpful to the compiler (and to other programmers, who have to read your code). In some languages like JavaScript, the semicolon is optional and a newline can be used to indicate that the statement is completed. But, remember, code is really written for other programmers. If your code compiles and runs, but it's really hard to read, it's bad code."
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68mqv8 | "as a service" | In the IT world I see the "aaS" acronyms thrown around quite a bit: infrastructure as a service, HPC as a service, caching as a service, data as a service. What does it mean to have these as services and why is it beneficial? Edit: thanks for the replies. I see it is a subset of cloud computing and cloud storage. Can it be said that doing something as a service is the same as doing it in a cloud? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So you know how \"Cloud\" used to be the big term? This just means using someone else's machines instead of your own. But clouds were passive. You store things on them but whatever you're doing on your end is the processing of that data. Now take the cloud and have it not just be your storage, but be your application as well. Google Docs was a good early example of something like \"office as a service.\" You didn't need anything other than a web browser to do everything MS Office could do, and it would even store the documents for you. A company that backs up your data on your servers, but keeps it in the cloud (along with the backup software) is Software as a Service. tl;dr \"aaS\" is when someone else does an entire function for you, rather than just passively store data.",
"\"As a service\" means \"pay someone else to deal with the boring stuff.\" The \"traditional\" model of running a big application on many machines is that you have to do it yourself. You have to build a datacenter, which means finding a room or building, making sure it has enough power and cooling to handle servers, and installing the servers and the wiring. It also means having on-site staff to swap out broken pieces, monitor the heat and power and do stuff if something breaks, and do regularly scheduling updates. These are all things that have *nothing to do with software*, but you have to do it to run your software. This means getting relationships with hardware vendors, staffing for the admin people to manage it, potentially dealing with real estate, etc. It's a lot of overhead. Doing this \"as a service\" means that one company that specializes in datacenters builds the big-ass datacenter and manages all that annoying stuff. They get the power and run the cables, they have the staff that swaps out bad hard drives and manages fail-over and data recover. Then the company with the software application just needs to pay a monthly fee based on usage, but not having to muck around with all the details themselves. The datacenter provider also has some advantages of scale. They can build redundant datacenters and create automatic fail-over to protect against natural distasters, something that a small company couldn't afford themselves if their \"datacenter\" is only the size of one room. This \"as a service\" model can extend to different layers or levels up the software stack. The datacenter model that I just described is talking about just managing the physical machines, which is what \"Infrastructure as a Service\" usually means. But even after you have the physical machines, there's still another layer of ~~bullshit~~ administrative overhead with managing the OS. Things like managing security patches, restarting slow servers, load-balancing, that sort of stuff. Normally you would hire a sysadmin to take care of it. But you could also use a \"Platform as a Service\" provider, and they'll take care of all that for you and you just load your software into their managed, curated OS. All the other \"as a Services\" are basically just other aspects of managing large-scale or distributed applications that can be outsourced to a specialized company. It depends on how much of your computing environment you're ok offloading to someone else, and how much you want to control yourself--either because your needs are non-standard, or because the guarantees provided by \\*aaS offerings aren't sufficient. The main advantages are different forms of cost-savings. As-a-service offerings can usually benefit from immense economies of scaling, lowering their per-unit cost. They also usually have no up-front costs and a pay-for-what-you-use model, which is more efficient for everyone and especially important for budget-constrained start-ups. What this means is, rather than dropping a million dollars to build your own datacenter and then paying upkeep on that datacenter regardless of whether it's at 1% or 100% utilization, you can literally buy minutes of computing power if and when you need them.",
"\"As a service\" is in contrast to \"as a product\" In the past decades, the dominant business model was to think of software as a thing that you have to manufacture and ship, like you would a piece of hardware. Once it gets in the user's hands, the manufacturer has very limited obligations of ongoing support. This made sense because before the Internet became commonplace, the user and the distributor would have very little interaction, period. Now that broadband is everywhere, every software needs constant maintenance to ensure its security, it makes more sense to think of it as an ongoing subscription to a service. This 'as a service' model started in software, but has migrated to related fields. * Infrastructure as a product: I bought a backup generator. Now I take care of it at my own expense. * Infrastructure as a service: I signed a contract with a backup power provider. Now they do routine maintenance and will take care of any problems that come up. I bought a big server vs. I signed up with a provider to handle my servers for me. Etc.",
"Pay me 10 dollars a month forever instead of a hundred dollars, once, today. Lets say I make hard drives for computers. I sell you a gigabyte hard drive and that's it for me. The one sale and then you have the hard drive and can do what you want with it. Maybe if it breaks or you need more storage later you will come back to me, or maybe you wont. However... you don't actually want a hard drive. You want to store your data, and the hard drive is just a method of doing that. If I sell you storage as a service, I.E. i rent you a gig of storage for $10 bucks a month that stream of revenue exists forever. There might be some advantages to you. Suddenly if a hard drive fails that is my problem not yours. But \"as a service\" really exists to try and change one of sales into recurring monthly fees so companies make more money."
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68ntop | Why do websites push us to use their app? | What difference does it make to them which way we access the content? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They may hope to gather more data on you, push notifications, add microtransactions, etc. It can also be the result of a manager or VP or C-level thunder*cough* having a \"bright idea\" as often as not.",
"Your mobile phone can expose your name, number, current location, contacts and call history, etc. This information in extremely valuable in today's business and political world for many reasons. Advertisers purchase this kind of information to better keep track of what products you are interested in, and government intelligent agencies are always in search of personal data with which you can be profiled. Also, a mobile app increases the content access rate since the majority of mobile phones are always in people's hands or very close to it."
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68pqdd | Why when websites are finished loading, the page scrolls up/down slightly so that you end up clicking on the wrong thing | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The last thing that loads on the page changes the location of the rest of the page. For example it might be an image which is of unknown size and the final configuration of the entire page isn't known. Once it loads everything jumps down to accommodate it."
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68q5fm | How do phones get certified for dolby atmos and the like with speakers the size of a cheerio? | When I had to spend thousands for atmos speakers in my entertainment room. Is it just marketing? Can anyone REALLY tell that it's dolby or beats or whatever? I mean to me, I don't see how these super tiny speakers do anything much more than just providing basic sound. Edit: punctuation | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They'll tell you it has to do with the sample rate of the sound card/chip as well as the frequency range of the speaker. In my opinion it's just a label that a manufacturer can purchase as an alternative to beats audio or perhaps a third desirable brand scheme. It's not 100% marketing, but it's almost entirely marketing, and the division between what is hype and a quality product lies in either becoming an audiophile or finding a decent news source written by one/some. Yes, there are likely audiophiles out there that can tell you the difference between good speakers/bad speakers, good controllers/bad controllers, but at the end of the day we're all just listening to poorly compressed MP3s anyways, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. when I buy decent headphones I look for an even sound stage, which is akin to the effect an equalizer would provide. For instance, the first set of beats headphones artificially increased the bass of anything you'd listen to. this made them awful for producing because I'd master the levels to what I'd deem perfect and then play the same track on another system and wonder \"where'd the goddamn bass go\" so when you know the song youre listening to you will note it sounds different. But really, if youre just a casual listener, it doesn't matter in the slightest. edit: we arent ALL listening to poorly compressed MP3s, but that was hyperbole based on consumer audio trends. What im getting at is that we're trained to spend hundreds if not thousands on the cans and magnets despite the fact that we're listening to a source that is often passive, lo-fi or both."
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68qvc0 | When Reddit give a site the "Reddit hug of death" will it come back online by itself when traffic dies down or does it require human intervention? | And if the latter, what does it require? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine someone wrote on a men's room wall: \"op's mom gives $2 blow jobs 555-555-5555\". So a bunch of guys call that number, and once one guy gets a proper suck-job, he tells his friends. They start calling and eventually the line is ringing non-stop. You call and all you get is a busy signal. Eventually traffic dies down and you get your suck on. Like that, kiddo.",
"That depends on what caused the \"death\". In some cases the server is overloaded which can cause various issues from one person not being able to see the content, to the server locking up. Other things that can happen is the allotted bandwidth being used up, so you might see an error saying the site has used their allotment. There are many more, and what needs to be done depends on what the issue is. For example, if the server's used all of the bandwidth, the owner likely has to pay a bit more to get some more. If it's overloaded but not locked up, it would likely return to normal as soon as the traffic dies down."
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68r8cy | How does an EMP work? | How does an EMP knock out electronics? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetic waves are all intimately related. Generally if you have one then you can produce either of the others, given the right arrangement and motion of your components. For example, a coiled wire with electric current running through it will become an electromagnet, a spinning magnet can be used in a generator to make electricity flow, and an antenna can convert absorbed radio waves (a kind of EM wave) into a bit of electricity. Generally when you look at antennas you're looking at incredibly small amounts of electricity created from the absorbed radio waves. The radio waves are pretty low power and the receiver is very sensitive, while the antenna is typically designed to be sensitive mostly just to a small sliver of the radio spectrum. With an EMP you get such a strong burst of radio waves (and other EM radiation) that practically anything can be an antenna--wires in devices, even the bits of metal on circuit boards that carry signals from one chip to another (called \"traces\"). If it's conductive then it'll convert some of that radio wave into electricity. This can have two effects. The first is that if that wire was carrying a signal then it's likely that the real signal will be overridden by the noise of the EMP. Many signals are robust against some level of noise and dropout like this, but few systems can operate with everything going wrong at once. Often a device will recover from this effect, although any persistent memory could have its contents erased or randomized leaving the device effectively unusable. The other effect is more destructive: the electrical energy has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is more often than not heat. The amount of heat that devices can take is limited, especially on the very, very small scale. If too much electric current is induced in just the wrong place then a component can fail, and if that component was important then the device may be rendered completely inoperable.",
"Nice try Kim Jong-un. Get your science knowledge elsewhere. And my countrymen won't spill the beans either."
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68ro2e | In terms of polygons in animation and video games, why are triangles used more often over other shapes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because triangles are the most fundamental polygon. You need a rectangle? Just put two triangles together. You need a hexagon? ~~6~~ 4 triangles. But you can't make hexagons from rectangles. The problem with this is that it can only do shapes with straight lines. If you need curves you need to use something other than polygons such as splines. 3d modelling packages do use them, but for games in the end everything is turned into triangles. It is a bit of a limitation, but if you have enough triangles it looks good enough.",
"I'm not entirely sure but basically i think it's because they are coplanar which means no matter where u place all 3 points to make up the triangle it will always be flat so there are no curves on the face of the triangle to mess up the textures. Edit: the YouTube channel computerphile has some really good videos on why triangles are used.",
"Because a triangle is the only shape where all of the vertices will always lie on a single plane. You can imagine any flat shape, there's always a way to move one vertex so that it doesn't lie on the same plane as the others*. But not a triangle. This might seem bonkers, but it's great for texturing, since it guarantees that in every polygon there's only one plane for the texture to lie on, and this makes calculations much simpler without annoying glitches. There were some old systems which used quads for 3D rendering (such as Sega's Saturn), but rendering triangles tends to be much faster and avoids problems when applying textures. Many 3D renderers today support polygons with more than 3 vertices, but they are usually broken up into triangles before being sent to the video hardware for rendering. (*)Here's how: Given a set of 4 or more coplanar vertices, grab any three vertices that form a plane (i.e. which are in different positions from each other and are not colinear). Grab another vertex which is not one of the 3 vertices you just grabbed, and move it a constant amount perpendicular to the plane formed by those 3 vertices (i.e. along its normal axis). Now the set of vertices is not coplanar anymore, because we just moved a vertex outside of the plane where all of the other vertices are.",
"It's the perfect minimal building block to construct surfaces. The triangle is the simplest generic 2-dimensional shape a computer can use, as it consists of only 3 points and their connections. Anything simpler (using only 2 points and their connections) is just a line, not a surface at all."
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68si49 | What happens if i accidentally put diesel in a gas car, and gas in a diesel car? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Diesel won't destroy a gas engine per se. The problem is that it won't ignite with a spark plug so the engine dies and you need to flush the diesel out and clean everything including injectors and spark plugs. Do that and the engine will run again. You could maybe flood and hydrolock the engine but that's unlikely. Gasoline in a diesel engine lacks the lubrication the fuel pump and injectors depend on, eventually wearing out the pump. Also, gasoline meters and burns differently than diesel, throwing off the engine timing. Multi-fuel diesel engines exist (most military trucks built after the 1960s have them) that can run gasoline, but they usually recommend you mix a lubricant (e.g. automatic transmission fluid) with the the gasoline. Again, the usual headache for a non-multifuel diesel given gasoline is just cleaning all the bad fuel out, not permanent harm. Alcohol can damage plastic and rubber (seals and other small parts) if they weren't designed to deal with it. Most cars today can deal with 10% alcohol without doing too much damage to hoses and the like, but they aren't designed for higher ratios like e85 (85%). Beyond the mechanical ability to deal with the fuel (without hoses disolving or pumps failing), multi-fuel engines need a way of dealing with differences in fuel viscocity (which can change how much fuel is delivered), combustion speed (which changes proper ignition timing), and ideal air mixture for clean combustion (which changes emissions output as well as controlling efficiency and other factors). Since modern engines usually already have a knock sensor (combustion rate) and oxygen sensor on exhaust (fuel air mixture) that means a multi-fuel engines need some sort of viscocity sensor. In extreme cases (e.g. diesel engines equipped to run straight vegetable oil or tar-like fuels like the bunker oil used by ships) the engine may need a way of changing the fuel viscocity (by pre heating). Adapting a diesel car for vegetable oil usually involves having a supply of regular diesel for starting, and a tank of vegetable oil that is heated by the engine...once the oil is hot enough to flow easily, the fuel supply is switched by a thermostat or a control the driver toggles."
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68taar | How can flash memory retain its data without power? Is it possible for it to lose data over extended period of time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, the thing about normal memory like the RAM in your computer is that information is stored based on whether electricity is flowing through the transistors within the memory chip. When electricity stops flowing through the transistors, they all reset to a default state and whatever was stored beforehand is lost. Flash memory on the other hand is a type of electronically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM). It's sort of like a combination of RAM and ROM due to its ability to retain information without electricity as well as having the information stored on it be erasable and rewritten. Flash memory utilizes a \"dam\" system that is able to store residual electrons from electrical current regardless of whether there is electricity running through it or not. There are 4 main parts to a flash transistor: a source, a drain, two gates called the floating gate and control gate, and an insulating material dividing the other 3 parts. They are in a o8o/inverted T shape, with the lower half being the source and the drain and the upper extension being the gates, with the control gate above the floating gate. The gates are surrounded by oxide layers through which current normally cannot pass through. Negatively charged electrons are present at the source (the originating point of the electrical current) and the drain (the draining point of the electrical current) due to the type of silicon used to make these parts. However, they cannot flow naturally because of the electron deficient insulating material between the source and the drain. When you apply a positive voltage to the electrical contacts at the drain and the gates (the top and one side of the inverted T), the negatively charged electrons are attracted to the positive charge and get pulled to the drain. Some electrons also get pulled up into the floating gate through the oxide layers through a process known as quantum tunneling. Electrons that have gone into the floating gate remain there. These electrons are unable to escape the oxide layers, and will remain in the floating gate indefinitely. Flash transistors with stored electrons are akin to RAM transistors with current flowing through them. To remove the electrons, a negative voltage is applied to the electrical contact above the floating gate, which causes electrons to be repelled away from the floating gate downwards into the drain, through the same quantum tunneling process. This lack of electrons is then similar to a RAM transistor without current applied. Flash memory has a certain number of program/erase cycles before it begins to lose its integrity. Degradation mostly occurs within the oxide layers that separate the gates. When the oxide begins to break down with repeated usage, it no longer is able to consistently prevent the flow of electrons in and out of the floating gate. Since the transistor relies on the electrons being unable to escape to store information, this causes the flash memory to become unreliable. It may still work, but may not work consistently or may lose information as a result.",
"Yes they can loose data over time as they work by trapping electrons and eventually the electron escapes. I'm not sure how it is possible though"
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68to39 | How do hard drives save data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"the hard drive is composed of a metal disk that can rotate, and a \"head\" that can move over the surface of the metal disk. The hard drive \"writes\" data by using an electromagnet to magentize or de-magnetize spots on the surface of the metal disk. Later, to \"read\" the data, it can move the head over these same spots, and as it moves it'll either detect a magnetic pull or not. The presence or lack of a magnetic pull is interpereted as a 0 or 1."
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68uqwb | If the TV stations get paid by the commercials they run so they can broadcast over antennas for free, why can't they also show their stations online for free? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The shows that they air are licensed from other companies -- television studios, the ones who actually make and own the shows. These licenses are geographically restrictive. A studio would license a network to air that show in only one country. So, any online streaming would need to be able to reasonably assure that only people in that country are watching it. There's another issue for the major broadcast networks in the US. Each local station has an exclusive right to show those shows in their market. So, imagine an ABC station in Memphis starts streaming everything they air. How can they ensure that the only people who can see the stream are from the geographic area they have licensed? They can't. So, they don't stream."
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68veo4 | What is the use of Windows 10-S if there is allready a Windows 10-Education? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It seems like these two products are actually targeting two pretty different segments, even though both are \"for\" education. Based on what I'm seeing search-wise, Windows 10 Education is a better fit for desktop and \"real\" computers, especially those in a large network deployed by a school. Windows 10 E supports remote deployment and push installs, and other \"I'm 1 IT guy with 500 computers on this campus I need to manage\" things. Windows 10 E licenses can be purchased separately from computers, you have a headcount and can buy new computers and throw out old ones as you need, as long as you stay under whatever number seats you paid for. Windows 10 S, on the other end, seems to be a very \"low end\" solution. It only supports software from the Windows store (no push installs over MS's remote management tools) and comes \"tied to\" a specific device. This model is probably going to be a better fit for small & medium sized school IT setups. Since computers *with* Win10S start at $189 (for OS, hardware, everything), that means they're pretty much giving this operating system away, and the Windows-Store-only limitation is an intentional achilles heel to make sure bigger schools and companies still buy the \"real\" Windows 10."
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68ywlc | What is the difference between a machine that uses a combination of a Neural Network and machine learning techniques, and "true AI"? | For bonus points, why haven't we got "true AI" yet, what's the largest hurdle? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"When we talk about AI, this means all the attempts we've made to make a program or robot act or think like we do. # 1. Basic AI: rule based system For example, you can write a program to pretend to be a therapist (\"Everybody hates me\" / \"Why do you say that everybody hates you?\"). This would be a tedious task. You would have to write lots of hand written rules. It's not rocket science, but it is still AI. However your program didn't learn the rules itself. You gave it the rules. This is a type of AI called a *rule based system*. # 2. A bit smarter: machine learning but not deep learning The next step up is a type of AI where the bot will learn the rules. For example you could give it lots of example interactions between therapists and patients and define the kind of patterns that govern them and how complex you want your program to learn. You will also tell the program some useful hints: for example English is divided into words which are separated by spaces, it's read left to right, and has nouns, verbs and adjectives, and the therapist is normally responding to the last thing the patient said. You define a score and say to the program, \"refine the rules until you've got 90% accuracy\". This is a more advanced type of AI and it's called *machine learning*. # 3. Really smart: deep learning Now imagine you don't tell your program anything about English grammar. You give it very few hints as to how to communicate in English. Maybe you don't even tell it that spaces separate words. You define a very broad kind of program that could be thrown at any conversational task such as interactions with therapists garage mechanics in Japan or analysing financial news in German. You would just convert the patient's words into numbers and propagate the numbers through a repeated process of multiplying and adding with some extra numbers called parameters, and then convert back into text, which will be the therapist's answer. You just don't specify what the parameters are that you're multiplying and adding. Your program will pick the parameters that make it reproduce outputs most like the real therapists's utterances you have recorded. This is the current state of the art in machine learning and it's called *deep learning* and the set of parameters the program picks is called a *neural network*. What I just described can give really impressive results especially for making robots communicate with humans, or identify objects that they see. However the \"intelligence\" here is still a set of parameters (numbers) which have been picked by a computer to make it perform well on a set of sentences that we gave it. Is this really intelligence? # 4.... True AI? So a neural network is a type of machine learning. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence that doesn't use machine learning would normally be using hand coded rules (a rule based system). Have you ever used Microsoft Excel and fitted a line to a scatter graph? For example if you plot the height and weight of all the people in your class or work, you can get Excel to draw a line through it. How did Excel find the line? By picking two numbers, m and c, to make a formula y = mx + c. It picked m and c so that the distance from all the points to the line is as small as possible. The neural network has picked its parameters to make the distance between its simulated answers and the real therapists's answers, and by doing this was able to simulate a therapist with 100 million parameters. Now if you can answer the question of how to make the step from a set of numbers that essentially fit a scatter plot à la Excel, to true intelligence as found in humans, then that is the million dollar question.",
"Neural networks solve limited problems using data fed into them, they can't be given arbitrary novel problems and solve them based on their current state."
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68zi91 | MSSQL Server vs. MySQl vs. PostgreSQL | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You might also take a look at MariaDB, SQLite and Oracle to complete your list of relational databases. The main differences is performance features, cost and footprint. Oracle and MsSQL is the most expensive, have a high minimum resource use but have a lot of performance features. The other databases on the list will for instance have problems using multiple cores to improve speed. PostgreSQL is the most enterprise open source database and have quite a big list of features and good performance. It is also the database that will allow the most customization. It is free but there are companies that provide licensed third party support if you want. MySQL and MariaDB are smaller open source databases that were recently the same project so they share a lot of the same features. It does not have the same rich feature set as the more enterprise database engines but does have a much lower footprint and is a good compromise for medium size applications. MySQL does have a licensed option with a bit more features but in general they are both open source and free to use. SQLite is as the name suggest a very light weight database engine. It is designed to easily fit inside other applications, in cell phones or other embedded devices. However this does mean that it have a lot of limitations and does not have good performance. It is also open source and free to use. So they all have different features and is made for different things. If you have millions of simultaneous users and have to store critical data then you should consider paying for MsSQL or Oracle. However if the data is not as critical and does not need that much performance then PostgreSQL is the right tool for the job. For smaller applications where the idle resource requirements is important MariaDB is likely the best tool. But if you just need to store a few values and query them from time to time then SQLite is the best option."
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68zsxz | Why do some older PC programs not work on a 64 bit OS? | Shouldn't the newer OS be "smart" enough to make it work correctly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There are all sorts of issues with making operating system compatible with software written for older version of it. 64-bit versions of Windows come with all the parts necessary to run software written for the 32-bit version of the OS. However when it comes to really old software it may in fact depend on parts of the OS that has long since disappeared and would run equally badly on modern 64 and 32 bit OS. Some really, really old software that was supposed to run on 32-bit actually included 16-bit parts which run 32-bit OSs but no longer run on 64-bit OSs. Windows has a good system to allow software from older versions to run on it, but it is not psychic and you have to tell it to run like that. Making it smart enough to seamlessly work every time with old software would make it a lot less secure and useful. Microsoft has been trying to cut down on the legacy compatibility more and more, with the justifiable idea that after a decade or so people might have to accept that a few more steps are necessary to run the software on current operating systems."
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690nhq | Why do we use the current signal waves for wifi even though they can get disrupted by walls? Is there a better solution, if so why aren't we using it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think there are 2 reasons for this. The first one is that you don't want your signal to be able to pass through walls indefinitely. The wifi signal can pass through a few walls before it gets too weak, which is fine for most houses. Imagine that they could pass through walls without losing signal though. You'd have insane interference in crowded areas. If you live in a city you will already notice that your wifi list probably has 20+ wifi signals incoming. If this number was 100 times higher no one would be able to properly use their wifi anymore. The other reason is that if you did want to make signals that can pass through walls easily you'd need a bigger wavelength. Like radio waves. Those can easily pass through walls and are only stopped by tunnels. To generate such a wave you need a massive antenna though. Our routers at home are currently quite decently shaped. But imagine them being 10 times bigger. They'd be the size of your fridge. Which is also not very convenient."
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692syx | Why electric cars are not regular thing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The biggest reasons are probably that they still cost more than regular cars, they rarely have as much range as a gas or diesel powered car (usually less than half) and it takes a lot longer to recharge a car than it does to fill up your tank, there are also very few good places to do it unless you live in certain metro areas. All of that adds up to extra cost and inconvenience that most people don't want to deal with. There are also some people who just don't like electric cars. They enjoy the rumble of an engine or they really relish driving and loving rowing gears in a stick shift. I'm somewhat in that category myself. I recognize all the benefits, but there's something about pistons and gears and shifting a manual transmission that really appeals to me. The nicer electric cars have fantastic performance off the line and great handling, but it's just not quite the same. They don't have that \"machine\" feel to me. All that said, they are definitely gaining popularity all the time and they are here to stay I believe. The range issue is getting better (and isn't a problem if you have $90k for a Tesla). The recharging is likely to remain an issue for some time to come. If it's a commuter car and you just drive to work each day and plug in at home overnight that's fine. But if you're driving all over the place, there's a scarcity of places to charge, especially with the higher voltages you need to get it done quicker. Even if you do have access to quicker charging, it still takes way longer than filling a gas tank. It's going to be a LONG time before most gas stations have quick charging stations for electric cars. Probably at least a decade or more. So it takes a little bit of sacrifice and special enthusiasm for electric vehicles right now. They aren't going to be mainstream like hybrids are until they overcome those issues.",
"Depending on who you are, you might believe there is a conspiracy against electric cars, or you might believe they are just too expensive and impractical. In my case I take a little from A and a little from B... with subsidies and investment similar to those the Oil industry gets they would quickly become cheaper and more practical.",
"They *are* a regular thing. The electric car market is real and growing. Living in California, I know several people who now drive electric cars. They were not common until recently, because batteries did not store enough power cheaply enough, while storing a lot of power in the form of gasoline requires only a container that holds liquid. But batteries have been improved lately, through the hard work of thousands of engineers and scientists.",
"Range anxiety. The typical gasoline-powered vehicle has a range of about 300 miles, and can be refueled in mere minutes. The typical electric vehicle that is affordable by most consumers (i.e. below $30,000 per car) has a range on the order of 80-100 miles, and takes a long time to recharge, and often needs electrical access that many areas that handle large amounts of cars (i.e. parking lots) just don't have. Thus, if you commute long distances to work (which many Americans do), and EV doesn't really cut it for you, as there's a reasonable liklihood that it isn't going to be able to make the full trip."
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693zri | Why do radio stations that play pop music still say phrases like "80's 90's & Now" when the 90's was nearly 30 years ago? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Because we haven't ever settled on a label for the 2000s that doesn't sound silly. Some proposals have included: \"Nineties, Two-Thousands, and Now\" \"Nineties, Aughts, and Now\" \"Nineties, Zeros and Now\" Two-thousands is probably how most people refer to the decade, but it's a lot of syllables for the voiceover guy, jingle singers and DJs to say.",
"Honestly I'm not sure we've ever come up with a concensus on what to call the 2000-2009 years. Initially people used \"the 2000s\" or new millennium, but that doesn't work well anymore since it doesn't differentiate it from 2010+. I've seen 00's written a lot, but not spoken."
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6961ta | How does the new version of Google Earth create 3D images of places? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's done using photogrammetry. An aircraft flies over the area to be mapped and takes lots of photographs from different angles. Then software processes the images and to identify points that appear in more than one image. From this, the 3D position of those points can be reconstructed. The result is a large number of 3D points representing the geometry of the area being mapped (like those seen in [this video]( URL_0 )). Another piece of software can then take those points and connect them to produce a 3D mesh."
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6988k1 | Why is Spotify able to provide almost every artist and album out, yet Netflix is only able to provide a fraction of films? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's the issue of recording company consolidation in music but not so much in movies, but there's also a secondary factor. The timing of revenue expectation differs for the 2 industries. With music, the vast majority of the revenue related to a recording came from sales and the vast majority of those came when the song was new. It would then get radio play but really that just encouraged people to buy the album, same with a tour. So everything was about album sales and after 2 or 3 years those slowed WAY down. A song that was 10 years old was hardly expected to bring in any revenue at all. So when the streaming services came around looking for back catalogs, the record companies were very keen because it was monetizing something that had previously not been. The movie industry was different. They had engineered a revenue model that came in waves as the movie moves from stage to stage. First the theater release, domestic and then international. Then it would move to DVD for rental and sale and that would last for a period of time. Then they would sell the movie to the premium cable channels, eventually, they would sell to the normal cable channels. Lastly, the broadcast networks would get the final bite at the apple. Paying to air a movie that was 4 or 5 years old on some Sunday night or whatever. After that, the studio would often re-release the DVD. Disney was really the first studio to perfect this, but they all did it eventually. All of these stages would happen both domestically and internationally in different time periods. So the studios were selling the same movie over and over and over. They budgeted for that, it was a known process and something they could really on. Then came streaming. Streaming was a problem because people wanted it the same time a movie was available to rent. But that would kill the sales market, kill the premium cable market, and the basic cable market. Why would a cable channel pay the studio a premium to get the first rights to air a movie if anyone could just go to Netflix and watch it whenever they wanted. So the studios are very resistant to allowing a movie to live forever on a streaming service, whereas music labels aren't.",
"Films aren't aggregated by recording companies to *nearly* the same extent as music (so the minimum set of companies to make an agreement with in order to cover most films is much larger), and they're much *more* likely to be subject to exclusivity agreements. Plus, there's no semi-standard mechanism for licensing them in the first place, as (again) there is with music.",
"Licensing and contracts. Its cheaper for Netflix and thus us the consumers if they don't have their entire movie catalogue avail for streaming along with the DVDs."
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6992py | Why haven't humans visited the moon since 1972? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"[This article]( URL_0 ) covers it fairly well. The TLDR is that it comes down to budget restrictions, technological restrictions (current rockets aren't powerful enough to reach the Moon), a lack of political and public interest as well as NASA being more interested in putting people on Mars.",
"Largely, because going to the moon was a publicity stunt, an attempt to prove that the US was better than the USSR. Once that goal was achieved, there was no particular reason to go back. It's far easier and cheaper and (about 95% as) effective to just send robots. A similar thing will likely happen with Mars. If the Chinese (for example) make a serious attempt to go, the odds are good the Americans will make some attempt to beat them to it. And, then, once having been there, that'll be it, not necessarily forever, but for a long time. On /r/futurology/, they often talk about how living in space is inevitable or some sort of an ideal future. This is not a likely scenario. Space is too inhospitable. At best, we'll have an Antarctica thing going on, with a small number of researchers and their support crew living in space for various amounts of time, with the vast, vast, majority of people living their whole lives on Earth."
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699nes | Why have URLS got so long and complicated over the years? It used to be URL_0 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I remember back in 1993, my url was URL_1 An entire web history of stuff has happened since then. First of all, load balancers came into play, where the same domain actually pointed to multiple IPs. This simplified things further, such that we got to the URL_0 that you're used to. Next came virtual hosts, where the Apache httpd checked to see what domain was being queried, and sent you to a completely different machine/server based on that (so multiple domains were hosted on the same IP that pointed to whatever machine was currently available. From there, web hosting got more complicated as the domains got rarer; CDNs came into existence (content distribution networks) where the cdn. URL_2 domain actually pointed to some server geographically close to you that had the content cached. Since not all content could be cached in this way, the rest came from URL_2 which was still the original virtual host balancing system. THEN things started to move to unstructured databases. At this point, each uri, instead of being a directory path on a server somewhere, was actually an entry in a database. So they got served up as parameter values instead of as paths. Meanwhile, many sites became ad-supported by ad networks that served content off of an ad service into frames linked to the main site. This was all well and good until the WWW started switching from http (ascii text sent in the clear) to https (encrypted authenticated connections). At this point, yet another layer of tracking was needed to ensure that all the assets on the page were legit. We went through a period where most ads were still served http, most logins were https, and everything else was a mix of cleartext and encrypted by a plethora of certificates. Each part of this needed its own entry in the query to ensure the correct data was served up for the end user. Add to this sites like Amazon/Google, where the content served up is custom to each user account, and the use of AJAX and friends to serve up the actual content through back channels to a custom javascript-based client running in your browser window, and more tracking, parsing and organizing is needed to keep track of everything and make sure it is both secure, and going to/from the right system. TL;DR: the web moved from static content on a single server to dynamic content served up by numerous databases distributed globally that need to keep track of context to give you timely, context-driven data."
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69ahuf | Why is it so much easier to notice typos after you send a message, compared trying to proofread the message before you send it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your brain makes all kinds of assumptions for you when it builds a picture of something. Your eyes even have a blind spot that you never noticed because your brain fills in what it thinks should be there. When you are proofreading something that you just wrote, your brain will auto correct small mistakes because it knows what you meant to write. When you hit send you change the environment the message was in. there are different colors around, it might be in a different font, ect. So it kind of resets what your brain thinks is supposed to be on the page and you actually read it again. Artists take advantage of this by viewing their work in a mirror to find mistakes or just things they don't like. It is the same idea, viewing the work in a different setting resets what your brain thinks the work should look like and you actually look at it again."
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69atm6 | What's the difference between a formula and an algorithm? How does an algorithm work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"An algorithm is a sequence of steps. A formula, on the other hand, is an expression of information. For example: The volume of a sphere is represented by the formula: V = 4/3 π r3 That formula encodes the volume of a sphere based on it's radius. There are no steps in the formula, just information (The relationship between the radius and volume of a sphere). To calculate the volume of a sphere you might use the algorithm: 1. Cube the radius 2. Multiply by π 3. Multiply by 4/3 but notice that the above algorithm doesn't describe the formula it self, it describes how to apply the formula and get a result. A Genetic algorithm, however, can be expressed as a series of steps, but there is no concise representation for the information within a Genetic algorithm. i.e. there is no formula."
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69axge | What are the differences between mechanical keyboard switches? | It was my understanding that, in broad terms, cherry mx reds have the hardest actuation force, followed by browns, then blues, but after a couple years of going off this, this article makes it sound like there's essentially no difference between reds and browns: URL_0 So explain to me like I'm five! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Mechanical switches differ not only in actuation force, but also in the profile of that force. A switch might be designed to require a high force to begin moving, but then it lightens up. Or it can be made to get heavier as you push it. They can also differ in how much force it takes to keep them depressed, and with how much force they come up with. The design of the actuation in that article effects all of these."
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69chcv | How do LED thermometers work? | How can you get temperature information from lighting something with an LED? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Op are you talking about Laser Temperature Guns/thermometers?? (That tell the temp after pointing the device and laser at an object) If you are: the laser doesn't have anything to do with the temp, it just aligns the sensor that is located right next to the laser on the front of the device."
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69e1kb | If an electricity line breaks under a river, how does the electricity company repair it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"With a spice kit. The line is deenergized and divers will bring the cable up to surface and install a splice kit at the needed section. If too deep (typically ocean repairs) remotely operated vehicles will make the repair by cutting the cable and bringing the ends up to the surface. If the river is small, they will cut the cable on dry land make the tie in there and run another cable to the other side and make the other tie in. No need for divers. Edit: clarified some things. Still leaving spice kit though.",
"Daveed is correct sometimes. Often the cable will be concrete encased, or in conduit. In that case, it will generally be cheaper/quicker to splice back on dry land and just pull a new run of whatever cable is failed. Sometimes it might even be cheaper to use a boring rig to bore in an entirely new run of cable. It depends on the situation; the depth of the river, the distance to the failure point, how many failure points are suspected, size of the cable, number of runs, etc can all have an effect on the decision made on how to repair.",
"How do they know where the issue is? If it's a long wire under the ocean that's been severed, how do they know where to look?",
"On a former job we operated a submarine cable for our needs. We had a kind of insurrance which would warranty us a boat available for repair ir 48h. When it happen the cutoff was not as clear as expected so we did some mc guivering to have a clear cut that we can locate. Then the boat came, pulled the cable to the surface, repaired it and put it back. As easy as it 😃"
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69e68e | What is Uber's Greyball program? | I was reading the New York Times (Failing! SAD!) this morning, and saw where the Department of Justice is probing Uber due to their Greyball program. I couldn't grasp the concept of what Greyball is and why it may be illegal. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Greyball is a software tool designed to keep undesirables from successfully flagging down or tracking an Uber driver. An undesired user is shown a fake Uber app, which appears to present legitimate information on driver availability, but is in fact showing them nothing but ghosts, and does not actually connect them to a driver. Uber uses this tool, in combination with information culled from the internet and social media, to flag law enforcement, politicians, regulators, and other persons of interest in regions that don't permit Uber's operations. This keeps them from using Uber's own app to lure violating drivers into traps, or to track their numbers and movements. Arguably, Uber is using this program to aid and abet their drivers in breaking local laws, hence the investigation."
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69ea9g | I still don't understand the "red eye effect" of cameras and sometimes even video cameras. | URL_0 Don't know if it still happens with smartphones and selfie culture, but I'm just curious why it happens in simplest of terms. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When the light from a camera flash goes off, the pupils do not have time to constrict, and so a large amount of light is reflected off of the Fundus (the interior surface of the eye). Due to the large amount of blood in the Choroid, the light picked up by the camera lens appears red. Since the angle the light goes in to the eye is the same angle that it will reflect out, the closer the flash is to the camera lens, the greater chance the reflected light will be seen by the lens. The darker the environment a person is in, and thus the wider their pupils are, the greater the chance of having the so called red-eye effect"
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69fnnb | Why does metal react so violently when microwaved? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The way microwaves work is through jiggling charged/polar particles in your food (the water primarily). This jiggling increases their temperature and that heats up the rest of your food. That's why you can't heat oil as easily as you can water. However, metals like iron are *great* conductors of electrons. What makes them good conductors is a little complicated but basically, the reason is that they have a soup of electrons moving from atom to atom with almost 0 energy needed to move an electron from one atom to another. Thus when the microwave jiggles these electrons, rather than giving energy to the atom, it gives it to the electron which zips around in the soup. The amount of energy given to the soup can get high enough to bypass the natural insulation of the air and cause electrons to jump from the metal and rip through the air. This is called a spark and is basically what happens during a lightning strike."
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69g1i4 | Why isn’t Linux as popular as Android? | Just as Android provides an open source OS for mobiles that manufacturers can modify to their liking, Linux can be used for PCs. Still today Windows and OSX are more popular, despite being paid/closed source. Why didn’t Linux gain more popularity? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One *major* factor is that there are far more devices sold with Android preinstalled than there are with desktop Linux, and Android arrived at a time when there was no cross-manufacturer alternative, whereas desktop Linux has always had to compete with an entrenched base of Windows installations. Most people don't change the software installed on any of their devices, except sometimes when offered an \"upgrade\" that keeps most things as they were, so any OS that has to be installed has quite a large bar to get over. Custom Android builds (like CyanogenMod was, for example) seem to have similar popularity to desktop Linux, which would seem to bear this out.",
"Youre thinking consumer computers. Basically every little \"smart home\" device, or pretty much really anything small and capable of computing, runs a linux distribution of some sort. Without Linux we wouldnt have really anything other than your personal computer, but the internet would be useless because your router likely runs linux, as well as just about every web server out there. Linux just isnt useful - super duper - for a consumer, but without it, we would pretty much be in the dark ages.",
"Well Android *is* Linux. Linux isn't a whole operating system, rather a single (but central) part called the kernel, and the OS kernel used by the Android project is Linux. Often, though, 'Linux' is used more broadly to refer to any Linux-based operating system, so the term 'Linux' is a bit overloaded, and it can get confusing. The Android project uses Linux for the same reason most computers (with the exception of desktops/laptops) use Linux: the fact it's open-source, requires no special license and already has a lot of the features that manufacturers want in an operating system. OSX/iOS and Windows, for comparison, can't be used for free by another company, they can't be extended with new features or special setups beyond what Apple/Microsoft ware willing to personally go out of their way to accommodate, and with the exception the desktops/laptops don't support nearly as many pieces of hardware or software made for servers, datacenters, etc. **So what's the deal; why are desktops/laptops so different?** Historical reasons mainly: Apple and Microsoft got into the personal computer markets in a user-friendly way much earlier than did Linux, so most everybody out there is comfortable with using OSX/Windows, so most people keep buying computers that use one or the other, so almost all of the personal-use software like office suites, photo editors, etc. are written for OSX and/or Windows, and this means many people have to use them, and that means people *continue* to be more comfortable with them and people *continue* to keep buying them. It's a feedback cycle; nobody wants to go to Linux and not have MS Office or Photoshop, so nobody does, so nobody at MS or Adobe cares to port MS Office or Photoshop, so nobody wants to go to Linux and not have those programs. When smart phones came along it was different; nobody really expected all of MS Office or whatever to run on their phone, so when Google decided to start the Android project Linux was a natural choice. It's the same thing that explains [Linux running 498/500 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world]( URL_0 ), and similarly the fact that a majority of routers, webservers, databases and just about every kind of computing resource out there is Linux based."
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69hjxu | How do mirrors in videogames work? | Obviously mirrors irl are based around actual reflections, but how does that translate into a digital format? Are games rendering secondary identical models that copy the original's every move, but flipped? Is there an entirely reversed area "behind" the "mirror", with the "mirror" being nothing more than an invisible wall? And why did it take me this long to wonder about this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of games have a copy of the room on the other side and the mirror is just a window. Then it copies the player character in reverse.",
"Most modern computer games use the concept of objects (a wall, the players character and so on) and then have a camera. That camera takes often 30 or 60 times a second a picture and then puts it onto your screen. It doesn't know about rays of light though. Instead it calculates the position of each object and then checks which pixel shows which part of an object to determine the color of that pixel. To show a mirror, a reflection in water or similar effects they have two cameras. One takes the picture from the perspective of the mirror. Then they \"glue\" that picture onto the mirrors object and take another picture from the perspective of the user. This is a lot of work and the main reason why reflections are rather new and uncommon. Sometimes developers cheat and use a fixed image for the mirror image. Then the players character doesn't have a mirror image.",
"There's different approaches really based on how realistic you want the reflection to be and more importantly the performance hit that you can afford because reflections are expensive generally. The most realistic way of rendering an actual mirror reflection wouldn't be an option for real time games (ray tracing photons and doing an actual physical simulation of them bouncing off a reflective surface) so the general straight up approach is simply to render the scene from the view of the mirror and then from the normal view of the player. this provides a straight mirrored result but can be expensive because you end up rendering a scene twice. Usually this a is a problem because many games are already pushing the hardware before even getting to mirrors. This is why many games avoid mirrors all together or if they do have them it's only in a small environments like a bathroom for example. They may also limit how many mirrors they use and or make it so that mirrors can't mirror each other like in real life. Sometimes they'll limit what actually gets rendered in the reflection like what objects actually get drawn or the resolution of the mirrored rendering and limit the draw distance to a very short distance for mirrors all of this can save on performance and allow you to use mirrors in more complex environments. You can also do things like make the reflection update at a lower rate than the main game or pre render the reflection and do a cheesy overlay of the characters player model on to it. This ideas game developers have come up with are numerous so i can't go over all of them but if it isn't obvious there's some pretty clever ways to tackle the problem."
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69i8yp | Are the giant LED panels on every tough guy's pickup truck just the equivalent of a rack of roof beams, or is it something else? | Also, it has to be illegal to use them on the road, right? I drove past someone with one on last night on the other side of the freeway and I literally couldn't even see headlights beyond its glare. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're usually used by off-roaders and hunters, and you're right, they're not meant to be used on the road. AFAIK that would be entirely illegal in any state in the US, to run them on the road."
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69j7ue | a few short years ago 3G Internet used to be amazing. Why is it now barely functional? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The first computer that took hours to calculate a math problem and took up a whole room was amazing compared to someone having to do that same thing by hand. It's all based on what you are comparing it to. Now since we have much faster speeds with LTE and WiFi is so abundant, 3G seems much slower in comparison. Also, the content we can view on the internet is taking advantage of the faster speeds, so a slower connection will be much more noticeable. Being able to stream 1080p content on YouTube wasn't available many years ago but now HD videos and pictures are becoming standard and are everywhere.",
"Internet speeds seem to 'decay' over time because website developers tend to exploit the internet speeds they expect. So they'll include more graphics, more ads, etc. as the average Internet speed rises. Even when there aren't visible changes, they'll often have various tracking functions and metrics running in the background from third parties - and those third parties are operating on the same 'consume what bandwidth we expect' theory. In terms of 3G Internet in particular, mobile data suffers from a 'tragedy of the commons' situation. The carrier has to pay for the total data used, but it normally doles out that data at a flat rate to consumers. As a result, it's often in the interest of the carrier to buy less bandwidth even if that means slowing down the consumer's connection.",
"What do you mean by barely functional? I have 3g, and it's working great. I'm not aware of any reason 3g would behave differently now than when it was launched.",
"The issue of the data we are consuming being a problem is there. Another reason for the perceived slowdown that I have heard of is that in some areas, mobile networks have repurposed the 3G bandwidth and radio frequencies for 4G."
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69k3zl | why does switching website players from flash to HTML5 take long time? | iirc twitch and crunchyroll are in the middle of this process isnt it basically just uninstalling/reinstalling plus writing some code changes? they dont need to remake their websites or anything right? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A flash site is actually a large amount of custom-written software specifically designed to work with the flash system. It has to be completely rewritten to work with HTML5 instead; the two systems are not very similar. Consider switching a Shakespeare play from English to Chinese. You need to redo every word, and even though software can help you with parts, ultimately you will be completing the whole job, meticulously, by hand.",
"No they actually do need to redo a good portion of the website to make that change. It's not simply a flip of a switch to change it over."
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69l26g | How do vending machines recognize 'new' money when the design has changed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't. I work at a hospital in germany and for about a year, the parking lot machine didn't accept the new 10€ bills. Eventually someone from the Company that manages them went and upgraded the machine, but only after enough people complained.",
"As far as bill validators go, you have to update the software on them. With certain models, you buy a little upgrade module that plugs into the bill acceptor and set the dip switches to program mode. Source: I've upgraded dozens of these myself. Here's a press release from one of the manufacturers: URL_0",
"For coins, vending machines don't care what's stamped on the front and back, they measure: * Size * Weight * Material (magnetic or not) * Edge serrations And none of those things change when they decide to put a different face on a nickel or a different back on the Quarter.",
"For coins, they have to be converted for the different characteristics - weight, size, rolling speed. Companies in the UK are currently doing this for the new 12-sided pound coin that has just been introduced and will replace the old round one completely by October. The cost is considerable, one estimate I've seen is £50 million just for converting car park ticket machines and some £100s of millions across the board.",
"The device that accepts payments is often separate from the dispenser, and can be reprogrammed or replaced as needed. Ideally, this happens before the currency appears in your area. The device makers collaborate with the money design bureaus whenever a new note or coin is planned, so they can work out what sensors and validation algorithms are needed.",
"In Australia, we just started rolling out the [Next Generation Banknotes]( URL_0 ) last year with the $5 note. These new notes are primarily distinguished from the old by a the addition of a strip of clear plastic, which the old note readers weren't able to understand. So I was employed for a while swapping out the note readers in ATMs and supermaket self-checkouts. With the $10 note coming out later this year, there will be a software update so that they can recognise those notes too.",
"As others have said, for notes usually a software upgrade will suffice. For coins, it's a little more complicated. In both cases, vending machine manufacturers will be able to get the new cash much earlier, even as much as a year, along with guidelines on what security features are available to them. In the case of coins, this may be detecting the physical size, or it's magnetic properties, in the case of banknotes a special scanner is usually used. When actually getting the changes out there, the manufacturers might do it as part of some kind of servicing agreement, or as a software update, but often whoever bought the machine will have to pay for the upgrade.",
"Even when the currency changes, it keeps the pattern. The pattern is a set of 5 little marks on the bill that you would never notice, but are all the same distance from each other on every bill. The sensor in the machine is reading the pattern.",
"If it helps, the self service machines for the post office had a software update that allowed them to accept the new coins. All that had to be done physically was to swap the old £1 hopper for the 5p hopper. I have no idea why that was though.",
"They don't. Hungary just changed their money to monopoly money. Couldn't get a public transport ticket until I got some old money by buying a beer."
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69la18 | What when wrong in this ↓ video, that the arms of the girl appear weirdly thin and sometimes seem to disappear completely? | URL_0 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dh7n7ig"
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"text": [
"She's not standing in a real room, but in front of a green screen. The software has troubles filtering the rapidly moving arms from the background.",
"I'm not sure is I agree with the other answer. I don't think the software should have much of a problem with the motion if it's a green screen, because her arms should be able to stand out from the green background in each frame with or without motion. I think the primary cause is more likely to be due to limited framerate. At a framerate of only 24 fps, each frame is captures no more than 1/24 of a second. Because of the speed of her arms, as well as their thinness, it could be that over the average of a 1/24 of a second for some of those frames, there was more empty space than her hand in each place over than 1/24 of a second. Lets say her hand is 1 inch thick from the perspective of the camera, but each time she spins them, she moves them 48 inches in a half second. That's 96 inches per second, or 4 inches per frame (at 24 fps). But if her hand is only 1 inch thick from the perspective of the camera, and is moving 4 inches in a each frame, then each of those 4 inches of space would be 75% air during that frame. EDIT: Apparently, the framerate of this video is 29 frames/second, which I think is still short enough to explain this effect. EDIT2: I downloaded the video and viewed sections of it frame-by-frame, and I think what I see seems to backup my explanation. Take a look at [this]( URL_0 ) screenshot I took. You can see her arm, but the thinner her arm is and the more near the outside it is, the less you can see it in each frame."
],
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7,
3
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69leo2 | Why do battery operated objects not work when the cell is in the wrong way? | For example, a clock which has a battery in the opposite way does not work. Does any current flow in the circuit at all? And does the cell lose its charge when in this orientation? I would expect there to perhaps be a diode in the circuit, but what is the advantage of only allowing current in one direction (e.g. in a torch) when it could work either way? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh7g392"
],
"text": [
"Think of a battery like a water pump and wires like pipes (that are filled to begin with). The pipes aren't directional, so if you allowed water to flow in any way you want, you could get some unintended consequences, such as motors rolling backward, etc. Diodes are one-way pipes, so any water flowing through in the wrong way just gets stopped. As for the battery losing charge when put in the wrong direction, it shouldn't because it's not outputting any electrical energy and it shouldn't be outputting heat (though it might), so it's not losing any energy."
],
"score": [
3
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"text_urls": [
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} | [
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69m6bo | with the advancements of technology, why do we still need cellular SIM cards? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh7m770"
],
"text": [
"SIM cards are basically passwords which gives you access to cellular data. So it's sort of like a key to a room, not a hallway to a room."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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} | [
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|
69n6gr | Why do new electric housewares smell like they are burning the first time you use them | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh7uagb",
"dh83oj6"
],
"text": [
"The varnish or insulation on motor windings and anything else that generates heat will outgas until it cures and sets. What you smell when it burns out is the resumption of the outgassing from the higher than normal heat from a failure.",
"Often heating elements are manufactured and shipped with a thin coating of oil on them to keep them from rusting. The first time you turn them on for any length of time they burn the oil off."
],
"score": [
12,
6
],
"text_urls": [
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|
69ot87 | Tactical equipment organization on a wearer | I know the gist of how the webbing on military vests or harnesses work and that pouches can be attached to it, and that magazine pouches for rifles generally go on the front of the abdomen. However, I'm wondering how the rest of the gear is organized? Is anything carried on the back? Or the chest? What items are usually kept at certain places on the carrying system? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh8903g"
],
"text": [
"I may be able to shed some light on this. Different units have what are called SOPs ( standard operating procedures) and pretty much what that means is \"everyone is going to do things this way\". Sometimes the reasoning behind an SOP is obvious, sometimes, not so much. So, for example all IFAKs ( individual first aid kit) will be marked with a red cross and carried on your left side. That's been the SOP for IFAKs ever since I've been in the Army and everyone knows exactly where to find an IFAK if your buddy is wounded. You don't even have to think about it, and that's extremely important in a high stress situation. You don't have time to be searching for a tourniquet while bullets are flying by and dude is bleeding out. Sometimes, SOPs are developed on a smaller scale. I've spent the majority of my time in the Army in a WPNS squad ( machine guns) and after quite a bit of experimenting we ( our squad) developed our own SOP for how we carry our equipment. How it can be deployed the fastest, the best way to consolidate ammo, ect. We still carry our IFAC on the left side, but we also carry other equipment in a way that's unique to us. And the process of developing a uniform SOP involved coming up with the idea, then doing drills all day to see what could go wrong, why it was faster or better, refining over and over and then declaring it the new SOP. So now all the new guys going into 3rd PLTN WPNS squad carry their gear in the way we developed. So TLDR; uniformity and practicality are what determine how your gear is played out. However, different people's kits are different, they just follow a pattern, or a slate if you will. P.S. as far as magazines are concerned, you grab a mag with your non-dominent hand and your often laying in prone. Having them in the center saves time and works P.S.S. Not everyone carries the same gear. I had admin stuff like maps/ compass/ whistle/ that my gunner didn't carry. He had a battle belt with an ammo pouch on his lower back ( he didn't need m4 mags So no need for a FLC) and I always had a pouch dedicated for tobaccoo"
],
"score": [
6
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} | [
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69r1uu | Why do most videos for me load instantly, yet images may take 20-40 seconds at a time to load? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh8pqsq"
],
"text": [
"I'm no expert but it might be because when you load an image, you have load it at full resolution and when you load a YouTube video, it is given the ability to load each frame at a lower resolution. I find that GIFs and other videos which doesn't lower resolutions take a long time to load."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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} | [
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|
69sn5j | Why is the quality of hold-music on a phone call so terrible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh92x2h"
],
"text": [
"Sampling rate- telephone audio is 8 khz while mp3 is 44khz. You can consider sampling rate to be the bandwidth of the sound, so when it is compressed down by so much it must reduce the quality. More in depth, sampling rate is how frequently audio waves are converted into digital signals used in phone lines today. The 8khz rate used is a compromise between usable quality and amount of data to transport. This keeps voice quality mostly in tact, due to the range of frequencies we produce. Instruments can produce noises in higher frequencies, which to be reproduced would require a faster sampling rate."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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} | [
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|
69ttk0 | Why can't checks be verified instantly either as good or fraudulent? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh9d2d8"
],
"text": [
"My bank here in Ireland has cheque deposit machines that read the cheque and run checks on it straight away, if it can. Cheques are rare here these days, but the last time I used one, the cheque was printed and the system handled it quickly. The bank's website says they credit your account by 7:30PM that day, but IIRC it was quicker than that."
],
"score": [
3
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} | [
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|
69u3b5 | Why do Google search images appear as coloured squares before they load? | Here is an [example]( URL_0 ) of what I mean. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh9dzho"
],
"text": [
"to not present an empty screen or an meaningless spinner while the images are loading, instead it gives you a content preview, improving the usage. this user interface thecnique name is \"blank slate\"."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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} | [
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69vkxx | How/Where do Windows computers search for driver software when you click "automatically search the internet"? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dh9t1hq",
"dh9pkq7"
],
"text": [
"The hardware devices in your computer all have a Hardware ID that Windows keeps track of. Each driver has four set of IDs (Vendor, Device, Driver Version, Revision - if I recall correctly). When Windows is asked to search the internet it checks with a repository Microsoft has. At its basic level, Windows requests a driver for a Hardware ID that is 'newer' than the driver it currently has. If there is one, it is downloaded and installed. If the driver can't be unloaded and replaced then you are prompted to reboot after the update to allow the driver in memory to unload and be replaced. Things can get a little more tricky with driver 'ranking' when there are multiple 'newer' drivers for a piece of hardware. In general Windows takes the driver that is the most trusted in those cases (based on who made it, if it has been 'certified' from Windows Hardware Quality Labs (or WHQL), etc...) The system works with the idea that in general, the \"newest\" driver is the best one, but it isn't always the case. EDIT: Changes words to make things clearer",
"microsoft has a vast online repository of additional drivers that vendor submit to. not all drivers are packaged with the windows software."
],
"score": [
8,
7
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|
69za0a | Why do monitors change colors when looking at a different/abnormal angle? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhajdxx"
],
"text": [
"The structure that makes up a normal LCD computer monitor isn't flat. If you were able to zoom in on it, and look at it from the perspective of something really really tiny, it's got depth to it, like looking at Manhattan from a helicopter. If you imagine the colours are created by interactions of various layers, all at different heights on this imaginary city scape, the only way the colours look correct is if you look directly down on it from above. If you skew off to one side, you're not looking through the layers in the proper manner, and the brightness will start to fade, and at extremes, the colours will start to distort. That's obviously a massive oversimiplification of it, but that's the basic idea."
],
"score": [
4
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|
6a0n91 | When two people share an mail account and communicate only via drafts, is it more secure than "sending" emails? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhaudfj"
],
"text": [
"No. It used to be because the actual text never moved from one server to another, but in today's technology the odds of you logging onto the exact same server that your partner logged onto are very remote - so any text you are sharing will have to go onto the wire (Internet) to be replicated across servers. A better way to do it would be to encrypt the email going both ways with a private key that is shared between the two parties. Then the person wanting to do the snooping would need to have access to either parties computers to be able to read the contents of their messages."
],
"score": [
15
],
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|
6a1g0z | How do those glasses that correct color blindness work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhb4pfq"
],
"text": [
"They don't \"correct\", really, but they do help differentiate shades. Our eye has three types of color sensors, or cones. One type mostly picks up blue, another green, and the last red. Note that I said \"mostly\", because they all overlap some. If someone with normal vision looks a piece of turquoise, their blue cones fire more, but the green and red fire some, too. Take a look at this graph. The colored curves show how responsive each type of cone is to the hues below. URL_0 Now, for the majority of colorblind people, the basic physical problem is that some of their cones are defective and those curves overlap a lot more. If you were to go back to that graph and shift that green curve 50nm or so to the right, it would almost exactly match the red curve. If someone's cones responded like that, their eyes would respond \"green\" as much as they do \"red\" when they look at something like a ripe tomato, and it would be almost impossible to tell red from green - which is the most common type of colorblindess. So, what Enchroma glasses do to help is what those gray bars in the background of the graph are showing. They block out a lot of the incoming light at those two big dips in the graph, where the cones tend to overlap and give conflicting information the most. Those glasses help their wearers to tell green from red and blue from green, but they can't actually make their wearers see new colors. They also only work for people with partial color blindness, because without *some* response from all three cones, their trick doesn't work."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://enchroma.com/images/howitworks/digitalcolorboost.png"
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} | [
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|
6a2kkj | If I run a light bulb from a battery, it will eventually get dimmer and dimmer until it dwindles completely. My phone will retain full functionality until it just suddenly stops working. How is this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhb8qh4",
"dhb8pkf"
],
"text": [
"The lightbulb gets dimmer and dimmer until it turns off, because the battery puts out lower and lower voltage as it drains. Your phone battery does the same thing, but your phone can operate over a range of voltages, and has regulators that prevent the battery from delivering too much voltage. Once the battery drains too close to the minimum voltage that your phone can handle, your phone detects it and shuts itself off. Technically, your phone battery isn't completely drained at this point; it has just drained to the point where your phone is programmed to auto shutdown.",
"Your phone contains a power regulator chip. When it sees the voltage getting too low, it causes the OS to warn you. At some point, it sees that the voltage is too low to ensure proper functionality and data integrity, and it cuts the power off entirely. This is a good thing. When a microprocessor has a voltage input that is too low, it can misbehave in unpredictable ways. When memory has voltage input that is too low, data can be corrupted."
],
"score": [
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6
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|
6a49b3 | What exactly happens in old video games when you hold a direction on a controller when you start the game? | I remember a rule of thumb to NEVER hold a joystick in any direction before you turn a console on to avoid a weird bug where a direction would always be being pushed, even if you weren't pressing anything What exactly was going on that made this bug occur? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhboq7o"
],
"text": [
"It's common to use [potentiometers]( URL_0 ) in analog sticks. The value coming from them can be off by a little bit. It's different for each device and can change as it ages. But with a self-centering stick, you can measure its apparent center. This is exactly what some devices do: they record the center position at power-on and report positions relative to that center. That way the center is really the center, even if analog components are acting up a little. And if the stick isn't centered when it's performing its center reading, you mess it up."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer"
]
]
} | [
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6a4o5g | what stops people from "counterfeiting" digital currencies? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhbnuaw"
],
"text": [
"That is the genius of the invention of blockchain currencies. Satoshi Nakamoto developed a \"mining\"/\"proof of work\" system that solves the \"double spending\" problem. When a miner solves a puzzle (it can be a pool of a million individual miners acting as \"one\" miner then splitting the reward), that miner chooses the transactions that go into a \"block\" of transactions. This is \"settlement\". If a transaction attempts to spend Bitcoin (or any crypto currency based on Bitcoin code) that doesnt exist (double spent) that transaction is invalid. A miner that \"solved\" the puzzle the past 10 minutes spent ENORMOUS amounts of energy doing so. This miner can double spend, but when he/she is caught(and they will be since the blockchain is completely transparent), all the energy he or she used will be wasted since all the other miners will not allow this miner back on the network and the block reward would be taken back once the rest of the world builds off the previous block. So basically, if a person wanted to cheat, they just threw away approx. $21000 in reward and his/her equipment suddenly became useless since he just got banned from the network. Worth it? Nope. And that is why it is impossible to counterfeit a Bitcoin. Alt currencies are \"more\" possible to counterfeit since 51% miner attacks are actually doable on weak coins."
],
"score": [
11
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"text_urls": [
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|
6a5cbv | Who knew what time it was when the first clock was made? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhbt6v4",
"dhbsc9k",
"dhbth9s"
],
"text": [
"In the early days of civilization, people needed to know the season because it would tell them when to plant crops and when to harvest. So some people started to keep careful track of the changing of the seasons, and they started noticing things. Like how stars slowly moved across the sky at night, how the Moon would cycle from Full to New to Full every 28 days, and how the Sun wouldn't always follow exactly the same pattern through the sky. Over time, the collective knowledge gained through study of the sky provided a surprisingly accurate calendar. As civilization developed, it became important to get smaller increments of time than just day, seasons, or years. So they developed sundials that tracked the movement of the Sun across the sky and afforded 12 subdivisions to each day, which became hours. Of course, since these hours were based on the Sun's movement, and days got shorter and longer as seasons changed, the length of an hour was not a fixed thing, and would vary over the course of a year. When the first clocks were invented, they tracked time not by the movement of the Sun, but by the rhythm of a swinging pendulum. This had the advantage of tracking hours even through the night, and was not altered by the changing seasons. The clock could be set by measuring the position of the Sun at its peak, at which time the shadow on the sundial would be pointing directly north (if you're in the Northern Hemisphere). Society kept the 12-hour daytime subdivision, doubled because time could be accurately monitored at night as well, creating 24 hours. At first, clocks only indicated hours, but eventually, more accurate gradations became useful, and they gained minute and second hands. To answer your question, the measurement and accounting of time has been a human invention, but time itself is a natural phenomenon. The current time is mostly just something that society has agreed upon. It's not as though the inventor of the clock built it and suddenly knew it was 12:49 PM. But it's vitally important that all the world agree upon a universal time standard for communication, which is why every society in the world uses the same one.",
"First there was day and night. Then mid day and midnight and twilight. Then 1 oclock, two o'clock three oclock and a rock. Then minutes then seconds. Then nano seconds. We just keep dividing as our measuring devices get better.",
"it wasn't until we had transportation that could move fast enough to matter that clocks became really important. the first [timezones]( URL_0 ) were established by railways because every town had their own \"local noon\" -- the time when the sun was directly overhead."
],
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|
6a5hln | How do air conditioners produce cold air? | I sound dumb when I ask this, but how do they produce cold air? I understand how they produce heat as that seems fairly obvious, but I'm clueless on them producing cold air. Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhbxfzt",
"dhbthp7"
],
"text": [
"The fluid used in an AC unit turns into a liquid when under high pressure and back into a gas when under low pressure. the exchange from liquid to gas absorbs energy (think you need to heat water to get it to boil) and transforming from a gas to a liquid releases energy (think freezing water into ice, you're removing heat from the water by placing it in a cold area that absorbs the heat). So an AC unit has an evaporator coil inside the ductwork in your home. this is a low pressure area where the fluid is able to turn from liquid to gas. It pulls the heat out of the air in your ducts to get energy to transform from liquid to gas. This cools the air in the ducts, which gets pushed to the rooms in your house. The gas then travels to a compressor which puts the gas under a high pressure which will cause it to transform back into a liquid. This releases the heat to the surrounding air. This is done outside so the heat is just dumped into the surrounding air. The big boxy units on the outside of the home do this. The liquid then goes back into the evaporator coil where it evaporates again, pulling heat out of the air inside, etc. The same thing is done in window units as well.. So an AC unit doesn't make cold air, it just moves the heat from inside to outside. Your refrigerator works in the same way as well. There are also heat pumps, which are AC units running backwards, moving heat from outside to the inside of your home to heat it on cold days.",
"They do it by letting liquid evaporate. Liquid needs a lot of warmth to evaporate. The cold gas runs through a set of what's basically radiators along wich a fan blows the air that has to be cooled. Later on in the cycle a compressor is used to force the gas to condense back in to a liquid state which forced the heat out, air is also used to cool this part of the system."
],
"score": [
20,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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6a6fiw | Are incognito windows used for anything other than porn? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhc19u5",
"dhc1fyz",
"dhc1amw",
"dhc2651"
],
"text": [
"They're useful if you want to enter your credit card number on somebody else's computer browser for something without having it try to remember all your details. They're useful if you're doing travel booking, a lot of sites that sell flights and hotel rooms leave cookies on your browser that raise prices the more you look. Mostly porn, though.",
"I use them at work for a clean cache and cookie free debug environment for stuff I'm working on",
"Probably for browsing Facebook youtube and such at work. But no, porn is what everyone really uses them for",
"For Website and web application development, incognito mode is a god-send. Saved me so many crtl+shift+R's.... (and is useful with them as well... irony!) It's also a reasonable way to do search engine work -- without any of your profiles and history and such, you get a much more 'generic' view of the search results. Google results are tailored just for you -- so if you are trying to see what others see, incognito mode helps. Buying or researching things for people that might otherwise see what you bought them via history or visited links. Opening a secondary website account (say, a burner on reddit and your normal account) without going through the pain of setting up a separate 'profile' of chrome. Using personal info or logins on someone else's computer. ...and porn. Lots and lots of one-handed browsing porn."
],
"score": [
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5,
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3
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"text_urls": [
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|
6a7nt8 | Why aren't we using IBM's Watson to help people suffering from Dementia? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhcbjwd",
"dhccnjm"
],
"text": [
"Help them in what way? Watson is very good at digesting large quantities of text and answering questions about it. There are several uses of Watson in the medical research community, to summarize and organize scientific papers. For Watson to get answers, you have to have the source material. Dementia patients that can't remember their past don't have a textual record of all they knew for Watson to use.",
"One of the key issues with alzheimers or dementia is that very often **the patients do not realize they are wrong.** Too mentally fogged to realize they should be wearing pants right now. Or they're *sure* the 35 year old man who just came into the house is their (long dead) brother, and definitely not their son. So they're not gonna ask Watson. Also, attempting to correct the person on their mistakes can be emotionally stressful and not actually constructive. If grandma says it's 1973 and you correct her, she feels shitty and feeble and old. Then, half an hour later, she does it again anyway. So fuck it, it's 1973 and grandma is happy. The use of tech to help old folks would be awesome, but Watson isn't the right fit because 1. he can't be proactive 2. he can't safely redirect actions/emotions. People who work with dementia patients have to regularly pick their battles and smile and nod to nonsense stories, or convince someone it was *their* idea and part of the normal routine to put their shirt back on in the dining room."
],
"score": [
7,
6
],
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|
6a85bm | How can a Credit card transaction over the phone be processed without the CVV? | Recently I ordered a Pizza from a new Pizzeria in the Canada via Phone call. The guy over the phone only asked my 16 digit VISA Credit card number and the expiry date and the transaction for Pizza delivery was processed. How would this work without the CVV code written back on the card? He never asked me for that. I am under impression that CVV code is mandatory for "Card Not Physically Present" transaction. Is this some new VISA policy? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhcfst6"
],
"text": [
"The CVV code actually **isn't** required to run the purchase. It's primary purpose is to help reduce fraud and headaches for the credit card company to solve, by being one extra piece of information to keep track of. Amazingly, the expiration date technically isn't required either! It's just that most systems want this data to have more information to verify the purchase before putting it through. Pizza deliveries, evidently, do not generate a lot of credit card fraud, and the CC service provider for the pizzeria isn't worried about it. I'd assume this is because it's hard to run up a large pizza bill, whereas someone could easily spend thousands at the electronics store."
],
"score": [
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} | [
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6a8rkk | Why do rotating fans cool us off? I thought that speed of molecules was proportional to heat. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhcv13i"
],
"text": [
"Technically it doesn't. If you leave a fan in a room without AC long enough the room actually increases in heat because of thermodynamics--you are adding energy into the room. However it FEELS cooler because the flow of air removes any sweat on the outer layer of your skin, lowering the temperature at that point even while not overall changing the rooms temperature."
],
"score": [
3
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|
6ab8qo | How does Google know about traffic jams in real time? | I was going to work this morning and I got a notification from Google now saying to expect delays cause of a traffic jam. Now I'm wondering, how does that work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dhd6cdq",
"dhd7kyt",
"dhdjabx"
],
"text": [
"All those android phones and iphones that have signed into chrome and gmail, they have geolocation turned on. This allows them to see where ids are and where they have been over what period of time. It's a good example of big data analytics. They also have other feeds into traffic services provided by government or infrastructure owners.",
"Also pretty sure google purchased another app called Waze which allows each user to add realtime notifications of traffic jams car crashes and police locations. They pipe that info into Google (you may see \"from Waze\" on google maps notifications.)",
"In addition to what the other commenters have mentioned, many places have speed sensors embedded into the road. It looks like two rectangles with truncated corners placed in the traffic lanes, immediately adjacent to one another. These are magnetic detectors and can sense when a metal object passes over. Since there are two of them, it's easy to calculate the time lapse between a car passing over one, then the other, and from that extrapolate the speed of the car. So those are scattered all over the place, and they are usually wired into the traffic signal system so that traffic light timing can be adjusted to make traffic flow more smoothly, but it's also where a lot of map programs get their data for determining traffic slowdowns and accidents. URL_0"
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6abr63 | Does temperature play into the performance of a computer and other similar machinery? | I was thinking about how a lot of servers are hosted in the bottom half of the US. Those places get hot! Could it affect the servers of they experienced a heatwave? Would it be smarter to house servers in a colder climate? Would a server in my Canadian shed work at peak efficiency during the winter (average of -20°C, peaks of -40°C)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well a server farm would have some serious AC going on so unless the power goes out a heatwave shouldn't be a problem even then if there's a power outage the servers wont be on anyways. Computers also aren't affected performance wise but stability wise by heat so you really only need to worry about keeping them from overheating not necessarily keeping them colder. Unless you pushing a computer to extremes (overclocking) just keeping it from overheating is enough and that's what most consumer computers are built to do. Now by stability we mean that when a computer get's to hot it will essentially start providing wrong answers to questions and thus eventually crash. earlier computers could actually get hot enough to cause physical damage but for a long time now modern processors have been designed to throttle themselves or even fully shutdown before they can even get anywhere close to being that hot so you really only have to worry about stability these days well that and not frying your processor with too much voltage again though this is generally only an issue for overclockers. Loss of stability happens because computers depend on electric signals traveling through the processors in a certain amount of time to function. This timing is based off the clock cycle of the processor and it's why processors have to be small to function so that the signal traveling distances stay manageable. As heat increases though these signals start to take longer to travel (resistance increases as heat does) and eventually they stop reaching their destination before the clock cycle rolls over. This causes errors in the processor at the binary level. Something that should have been a 1 might end up reading as a 0 and vice versa. These errors will cause issues in the software and eventually lead to a crash because proper continued functioning of a computer depends on the processor producing accurate results."
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6aby9e | Why does Microsoft care so much about people using Edge? | I understand pushing Bing over Google due to revenue from advertisements, but what benefit does Microsoft gain from people using Edge over chrome? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your user data is a valuable advertising tool, directed ads are *worth money*. You may recall that a law was passed saying your isp gets to sell your browsing data.. **Google has been collecting that kind of data for years!** That's why you get targeted google ads. If you search for a new deep fryer on google, then you start getting ads for deep fryers nestled in your gmail and on websites with google ads. They sold you out for those valuable clicks. If you use Edge, Microsoft gets to farm that data instead of google and Microsoft gets to target you for targeted ads instead.",
"Having control over a major web browser gives a company a lot of control over the development of web standards. There's also a lot of money to be gained by telling people which web search engine to use by default. Internet Explorer is and old & awkward codebase to maintain. If they can get people to use Edge, they keep the control without all the effort of taking care of a legacy codebase.",
"What's even better than knowing what you search for? Knowing everything you do on the sites you searched for. Also, with significant market share in the browser market, you get a strong voice in how browsers should work in the first place. Back when only IE was big, there was no real standard on how to develop webpages, you basically made it so that IE would show it properly. The competition like Firefox had to modify their browser to work like IE (even when it was a horrible idea) cause otherwise their user base couldn't visit the majority of web pages. Now the era of a single browser dominating everything will likely never return, but having significant market share still gives a voice in the development of future web standards."
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6ac5c5 | Why do most news sites for mobiles have a button along the lines of "click here to read the full article"? | I immediately thought it had something to do with advertising but I don't understand how. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's an acknowledgement that you are actually viewing the site and you weren't just randomly redirected or accidently clicked a link. . It's a way to measure if the article is actually interesting to viewers and also verification that you are viewing their ads for more than just a split second, which is all general click counts are good for.",
"My theory on this is that it shows the site that you are not a robot and are engaged in the article and thus the ads are more likely to be effective on you the reader."
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6aca7x | How does the AUX cord on a cassette work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You mean a cassette adapter? It pretty much works like an embedded tape recorder inside a cassette, except the reels of tape are replaced with a single head, where the signal received from the AUX cord is recorded like it would on a tape. It also has a spinning wheel where the tape movement detector would be, to simulate a rolling tape."
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6ack8l | What is IGMP snooping? | I'm not that technically inept, but this stumps me. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? How and will it help me in life as a casual gamer. I saw it in my router settings and it got me curious. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When a switch doesn't know what to do with a packet, it sends it to everyone on the switch. A multicast only sends it to the ports that needs it. IGMP snooping allows the switch to determine who is part of the multicast group, and only send it to those people. Since all your traffic is going out one port on your router, it will not help you as a gamer."
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6acqky | How does international phone calls have almost no delays(Zero ping) but internet voice chat lags a lot, and wouldn't even connect if the distance was big between the called and receiver. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"IP networks are packet-switched. This means that the data is broken down into packets, and each packet is individually routed. So some packets could take a different route based on congestion. This gives high reliability of the overall network traffic at the expense of latency. Telephone networks are circuit switched. This means that when the call is established, a series of connections is established from your phone all the way to the other phone, and those connections are dedicated for the exclusive use of your call for the duration of the call. The result is lower latency and high reliability for the call. It's less efficient than a packet switched network, however. On a circuit switched call, if the network is busy, the call won't be completed -- you dial, but you get a message that the circuits are busy. Once you are able to connect, you stay connected. However, if there is a problem during the call, like a cable cut, the system doesn't reroute your call -- it just ends it, and you have to call again.",
"Fundamentally there's not a lot of difference between the two. With a long distance call, your voice is fed into a computer are the exchange which digitizes it and breaks it up into packets (which is basically the same thing skype voice does). These packets are sent as data via a fibre optic network to the other end of your call. Services like skype differ only in that they use the regular old internet for transport and long distance calls use a purpose built network. On some level the internet adds extra layers of protocols that increase overheads and make it slightly less efficient but that probably isn't the main reason. The deeper answer is engineering. Long distance calls certainly aren't zero ping, but the data networks they use are designed, purpose built and optimised for low latency when used with a low data rate, intermittent stream of packets. The internet that acts as the data network for services like skype on the other had is designed and optimised for general purpose traffic, plus it tends to offer various connection speed options to every customer on the way through, all of which might not suit the kind of data that your skype call generates."
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6adreu | What causes that "ripple" effect when you touch a computer monitor? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"LCD monitors are called LCDs because they are **L**iquid **C**rystal **D**isplays. When you touch the screen, you're compacting a part of that thin layer of liquid held up on the panel. So, similar to making ripples in water, you are making ripples in the liquid crystals: the light coming from the back of the display is refracted slightly by the now not-so-uniform layer of liquid, making it look like a ripple. See here for some more specifics: URL_0"
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6ae1qy | Browser war. Why did they care so much what browsers people used? They're free, and some are even opensource. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're free, but they can still make the parent money, or serve some purpose. For example **Internet Explorer** - only available on Windows. Windows costs money, even if it comes with the computer the manufacturer had to pay for it. So if IE is a preferred browser, people need to give Microsoft money to use it. **Chrome** - Chrome reports usage statistics back to Google, and ties very conveniently into lots of other Google products and services. Google makes most of its money on ads, and the more data they have about people the more relevant ads they can show. **Firefox** - probably the most altruistic of the browsers. Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, and it's original drive of creation of FF was to break the IE stranglehold of the 90s and provide a free, standards-compliant browser that'd behave consistently on any OS. **Safari** - no idea, but they must be making it for some reason. Anyone else wanna chime in?",
"/u/gordonmessmer gets the \"what\" down, but misses some of the \"why\". Microsoft's strategy to keep customers captured in \"The Microsoft Ecosystem\" was \"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish\". They used (and still use) it to insert themselves into other positions and then compel upgrades and bankruptcies. So, for example, Microsoft would often give free versions of MS Office to the president of a company. Then none of his underlings could read his output unless he used \"save as - > older version\". This would frustrate the boss so eventually he'd demand to know how to \"fix this problem\", but wouldn't want to downgrade himself. Downgrades would feel so last-year and all his stuff would have to be systematically opened and re-saved with that save as older version. So eventually the boss would order an expensive upgrade of the whole company. Now there is no reason that Office had to work this way. With a little planning the \"doc file\" format could have been reasonably future-proofed into a forward/backward compatible core. But this was a useful strategy. Now expand that across businesses. If I can get your biggest customer to upgrade, then either you have to upgrade or you have to keep telling your customer to go back and save as - > older format everything they send you. And now you look hopelessly out of date. So now you have to upgrade. Also include the fact that \"forward thinking\" Bill Gates famously declared that the internet would never happen in any meaningful scale. (He really wasn't particularly smart about technology, he was just one of the bastards that knew how to manipulate people.) So Microsoft was _very_ late to the party. (EDIT: On looking for citations, this Bill Gates comment may be apocryphal. Microsoft was very late to the internet party, having just hoovered up Berkeley sockets and TCP/IP stack already developed by Berkeley and Apple under the BSD license. Windows had Server Message Block \"SMB\" networking, but that was premises only and could not be routed in any meaningful way. So windows did networking early, but it was very late in terms of any kind of Internet Protocols.) So HTML is, among other things, a document format. It can pretty much display any document you can imagine. Not decode any save file, but produce the formats and layouts of an intended vision. The actual intent of this vision, this HTML format, was to make document storage universal and accessible. It just so happened to \"also\" let documents refer to each other. But the true goal was to make the \"doc format\" obsolete. The internal layout of all document data would be controlled by a data file format that was controlled by public committee and that _anybody_ - company or individual - could write a word processor to manipulate equally. What a disaster for Microsoft! This would completely invalidate the whole MS Office model. There'd be no way to control who used what version of who's word processor, or spreadsheet, or whatever if everyone knew exactly what every byte of every data file meant. With no \"secret sauce\" there was no need to buy Microsoft at all. So, late to the game, MS did whatever it could to get _any_ browser. They gave it away for free - not just to screw Spyglass, which was a bonus, but to make sure that everybody would \"suddenly\" have _their_ browser. Then MS integrated \"explorer\" and \"internet explorer\" into all their applications so that you literally could not remove their browser without rendering your system basically useless. Then, having pulled \"market dominance\" out of their collective ass, they started making Internet Explorer \"Work Different\" than the standard. IF you pulled up anything in IE, compared to any other browser, you wouldn't see the same result. The implication there would be that the other browser was \"wrong\". Nobody could afford to go into for-profit business against MS' deep pockets and free price tag. (This is why Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation instead of a business. etc.) Nobody could do anything but _guess_ about the secret alterations that I.E. used. Everybody who used a standards compliant browser would get different results than all the people using I.E. This _almost_ gave Microsoft defacto control over the internet. It _almost_ worked. Then Microsoft released some really atrocious and really insecure stuff for authoring web pages that were, in turn, really atrocious and insecure. Their I.E. gambit opened a gaping pipeline from \"the internet\" to the heart of windows and so your data. One could craft internet URLs to delete files, install software, and do all sorts of harmful things. The very ubiquity and thoughtless integration that worked as the sharp edge of the wedge in Microsoft's strategy to control the internet through shear numbers was basically thwarted by the fact that the internet is full of assholes. And thank god for those assholes really, we wouldn't have the internet of today if Microsoft had \"won\". So the Price and Penetration were there, and the war seemed all but over, and then the worms came to eat the dead flesh from Microsoft's scheme. (That's what scavengers are for.) The completely insecure Windows platform with I.E. which gave any remote actor control of the Windows kernel at the load of a page, was just _too_ juicy a target. So people started losing whole hard drives when their friends didn't and they asked how and why. Well the users of the not integrated browsers were not anywhere near as susceptible to penetration. Which is sort of funny. Those other browsers were struggling to be just as bad as I.E. Their developers _wanted_ to offer \"ActiveX\" and the undocumented OLE extensions and match the \"special\" formatting rules but those were secret. So Microsoft had literally locked their opponents out of the chance to make the same mistakes. So at that point Microsoft is playing catch-up in the security realm. Trying all they could to turn the inherently insecure Windows into something that wouldn't burst into flames the instant it went online. And the other browser makers are trying to get their products to burn exactly the same way I.E. did because they were seen as failing to do what I.E. did -- e.g. break the rules in those secret ways and open all those convenient security holes. But the users were switching away to Mozilla, and eventually FireFox and such, because it was _safer_. Once enough people were using \"not I.E\" the differences between I.E. and the rest of the world were finally seen as true flaws in I.E. That is, with Mozilla, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and all the rest showing results one way, and poor old Microsoft showing them some other way, the user base started to understand that it was I.E. that was broken. Soon there were \"I.E. emulation\" check boxes and extensions in other browsers one could click to best-guess emulate the broken behavior of I.E. and now Microsoft was suddenly the one limping along. They needed to both fix the security holes _and_ fix their implementation to meet the open and published standards. They also had to do it in a way that didn't break their whole operating system. So for more than half it's life (from IE 5 until now, which is IE 12 or 13) Microsoft's browser has been trying to recover from their own attempt to steal and lock-down the internet behind a wall of secrets. Keep in mind that if they'd succeeded then they could pull out patents to kill anybody who lived through the wars. Once Microsoft had \"extended\" the internet with their secrets, they could \"extinguish\" anybody who dared to make a compatible browser. --- As an aside, these wars are not over. We've still got the Word/Office problem. Microsoft still has their secret sauce strategy at work. When governments started to demand open document formats so that they could use any software they wanted Microsoft paid a bunch of people to join the ~~IEEE~~ ISO so that they could control the Open Document Formats and inject proprietary vendor extensions tags. So Microsoft's \".docx\" format is just as bad as \".doc\" for having secret sauce. There is a \"vendor extension tag\" (or set there-of) that lets Microsoft say \"sure, we store our documents in the standard format like your law requires\" but if you say \"so how do we read that chunk there?\" they can say \"that's private\". It's the same bullshit of embrace, extend, extinguish but it turns out that you can only cram so much stupidity into those little chunks so it's a slog. --- So the browser wars was all about whether one company would be able to dictate what software you could use on the internet, first by subterfuge and then second by patent law. They were stopped at \"first\" because the internet is not just full of assholes, but some of those assholes had a sense of the stakes at hand. This didn't save the best of the best (WordPerfect) or let innovation flourish (Quatro Pro) in all areas, but it did stop the bleeding. So like any war, it was an attempt by the powerful to take land and things from people who had worked to create them.",
"Some useful perspective can be gained by looking at when the browsers were originally released, and considering the context that provides. Netscape Navigator, December 1994: Navigator was a commercial product, sold for profit. A number of developers of NCSA Mosaic (which was mostly free of charge) left NCSA in order to capitalize on the commercial opportunities in developing Internet software. Internet Explorer, August 1995: Microsoft licensed the Spyglass browser (a descendant of NCSA Mosaic) for inclusion in Windows. According to internal memos, Bill Gates was concerned that the spread of networked content rendered in a standard fashion threatened to \"commoditize the underlying operating system.\" That is, if information could be viewed equally well on any platform, revenue for Windows was threatened. As an interesting note, Microsoft licensed the browser from Spyglass in exchange for a percentage of their profits. Microsof then gave away the browser, cheating Spyglass of any revenue. Spyglass sued them, and won a pittance. Early versions of IE were a stop-gap while Microsoft wrote their own browser that wouldn't be subject to license terms with Spyglass. All of this, more than anything else, is the essential reason for the browser wars. Tangentially related, and also of interest, perhaps, are the Halloween documents: URL_0 KHTML (Konqueror), November 1998: Free Software (Linux and BSD) desktops did have access to Netscape, but didn't have good Free browsers. The KDE project set out to produce a usable mostly-Free desktop (they used a proprietary graphics library), including a web browser. Safari, January 2003: Before Safari, Mac OS was dependent on Microsoft to provide IE. At this point, Internet access was essential for any computer, and reliance on IE meant that Apple was dependent on their primary competitor, which was leverage that Microsoft could use against them in any negotiations. Apple forked the Free Software KHTML components and used them to make Safari and WebKit. Firefox, November 2004: After AOL acquired Netscape, various changes were made to the browser in an attempt to drive revenue for AOL projects. The AOL Instant Messenger was bundled, for example, and Netscape's pop-up blocking (which served to block advertisements) was very briefly removed before outrage from users brought it back. Several developers forked a new code branch to build a new light-weight browser that was focused on user needs rather than driving revenue for the parent company. Chrome, September 2008: Google derives most of its revenue in whole or in part using advertising in search results, or ads that are targeted based on information they gather from what users search for. It is vital to them that they are the default search engine in most browsers, and they release a new browser of their own (also descended from WebKit, and hence, KHTML). That browser is highly standards compliant, and being an advertising agency, Google is in an excellent position to market it to a broad internet base. As a Free Software advocate, I like to point out from time to time that while GNU/Linux still has a relatively small market share, software originally written for GNU/Linux systems powers virtually all of the browsers people use on a regular basis: Chrome, Safari, Android's browser, and iOS's browser all descend from KHTML. The only other brower that matters, Firefox, wasn't GNU/Linux specifically, but was Free Software since",
"In short: Dominance. Microsoft made it to monopoly with this strategy: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They want to dominate the market so they are the only one who offers a service, and by default they can decide what happens and furthermore, what other products work in which way. If you do business you *need* Office. You need to buy it. For that you *need* Windows. There simply is no alternative. MS tried and tries the same with the browser market and as such with the internet, they want to dominiate all and everything, so anything that is sold is by them or through their policies. Achieving the same dominance on the net-market the same as they have with desktops failed, but they are big enough to keep trying. The same worked for Apple very well. If you are in the Apple world, you are in a golden cage. No matter what one thinks about it, it is financially very good for Apple. In a way it is the same with google, they want internet-world-domination, as that increases they ability to control what you see (ads), which is financially very good for them. Add a few odd competitors who do it for \"ideology\", as Firefox. The question \"Why is the browser war waged?\" is basically the question \"Why want companies utterly dominate your access to the internet?\" and the answer to that is \"To press everyone else out and finally make all the money\"."
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6aeija | What is 'AI' in video games? | My brother is big on game design and has recently begun going to university to study it - can someone give me an explanation of what constitutes an 'AI' in a video game, or how that works? It was my understanding that AI hadn't been invented yet, or is this something different? I hear it referred to as 'Enemy AI' a lot. I don't know a lot about this stuff but I'd really like to be able to keep up with my brother and still have detailed conversations with him, so I'm looking for an explanation that starts broad and gets more specific. Thank you in advance. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Former game developer here, [AI]( URL_10 ), in this case, is any of a number of [algorithms]( URL_2 ) that *[simulate]( URL_4 a virtual actor in a video game. That actor can be an opponent, an ally, or any sort of non-aggressor like NPCs, birds and fish, \"intelligent\" items (like Frodo's \"[Sting]( URL_6 )\" that glows blue when orcs are near), etc. There are many basic algorithms that are the foundation of AI behavior. For example, [this flocking algorithm]( URL_7 ) is used for it's namesake, for the afore mentioned birds and fish. The [A*]( URL_9 ) (pronounced \"a star\") algorithm comes out of [Graph Theory]( URL_8 ), but it's the base for a lot of \"pathing\", where an AI needs to traverse a map efficiently while avoiding hazardous terrain like lava. [Behavior trees]( URL_0 ), also called decision trees, are structures that encode a series of questions that resolve to some action. I wrote a [Neural Network]( URL_1 ) of [Perceptrons]( URL_3 ) back in college that simulates neurons in your brain to learn and make decisions. Most AI in video games are very simple pathing algorithms and mere [State Machines]( URL_5 ). In video games, most studios would rather spend resources on rendering and other gameplay aspects, so AI is computationally cheap. Studios are also sensitive to the user experience, they want to craft a very specific and *consistent* experience, so high variability in an exotic and unpredictable AI is typically unacceptable. So cheap, predictable, and consistent are going to be the bread and butter of AAA title AI. AI, especially for video games, is a huge, huge topic, and it runs deep. Most algorithms used to make AI *weren't invented for AI*, they came out of other disciplines and just so happened to be useful for simulating intelligence, hence the use of A*, for example. AI also tie into the game, including it's physics, so it's easy to get distracted by all sorts of ancillary components.",
"AI stands for \"artificial intelligence\" and it has many applications in video games. In a more simple form, an AI can play Chess or Checkers against you on a computer. So this AI is using data & an algorithm to determine which moves to make based on your moves. In a more complicated form, it can be used in video games to help non-player characters (NPCs) act more human-like. So basically there are a series of algorithms that determine specific characteristics of NPCs (or AIs) from how they'll walk from point A to point B, how they will perform combat against you and against other NPCs, etc.",
"Ai is, like mentioned, artificial intelligence. it's simply the practice of getting a computer to react to its environment and act somewhat intelligently, to pretend it is a real, intelligent agent. So, computer players playing against the humans are AI, anything that governs an NPC's behavior is AI, anything that makes the computer react to the world it is living in is AI. Outside of video games AI has many applications, such as machine learning, data mining, factory assembly, pattern recognition, Targeting ads towards you, building cute robots, and so on and so forth. What you are referring to when you mention \" AI hadn't been invented yet\" is *true, general AI*. It's essentially when a single AI can learn, can think, can act, in essence is truly intelligent instead of just pretending to be. This is something that we have not achieved, or at least not fully. We're always doing research on AI and we've gotten some pretty smart robots, but we're a few decades off the singularity."
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6aewyf | Why do news websites insist on using terrible video players when it would be easier and more user friendly to embed Youtube videos? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Youtube has an infamously crappy report system that can be abused, so a breaking news story might be yanked because it offended some 14-year old in a basement somewhere. I'm also not sure about the rights situation, Youtube might stake a claim in the news station's video if they upload it there.",
"When using embedded Youtube videos they are not able to easily control ads (it is possible to layer in a video prior to the video but then Youtube may also serve an ad prior to the video). Also, by controlling the video player/ads shown, they can change the length of the adspace. This is huge because they can charge different rates for videos on the Homepage versus one on a deeper page as well as different prices for longer ads vs shorter ads. Finally, as another person already said, Youtube is not the best to be able to track analytics. So by using other video players they are usually able to better gauge the demographics of viewers (further enabling them to sell more specific advertising space to partners).",
"Have you seen what's happening with YouTube and demonetization? That wouldn't affect what you're talking about, but it's a good example of why you shouldn't always just use someone else's platform if you can provide your own. Their video players might not be as good, but it means they don't have to rely on YouTube at all.",
"Even if I don't like the crappy video players, i'm glad they don't all use youtube. YouTube is not really great for analytics, videos get pulled all the time or audio muted completely randomly, it seems tedious / impossible to get delisting issues resolved with YouTube - overall the only thing Youtube does right is let you upload videos for free, and it more or less ends there.",
"Money. The news stations can choose how many and what ads to play before, during or after the clip, and don't have to share the revenue with YouTube. They also don't have to deal with the Youtube TOS which may forbid even the slightest nudity, which is usually no big deal in most European countries.",
"Also, why do these video players often not include volume control?",
"Control of ad inventory, and being able to sell ads directly. It is all ad value. YouTube not only splits the revenue of all the ads sold, the CPM is less. A dedicated gaming website might be able to sell directly to a game publishing company and guarantee the viewing audience will be people interested in buying games. YouTube is also pretty well ad-blocked and that makes each view less valuable, while proprietary websites are always trying different creative ways to get around that, or baking in ads. It might seem like a small difference, but 10k views on that shitty player might be more valuable than 100k YouTube views, and revenue drives almost all decisions.",
"Why would you want to store your valued possessions in your neighbors house when you have a half decent safe at your own?",
"You have complete control of the vid if you don't use a 3rd party. Plus the reporting system and comments can add unwanted drama.",
"Reporting, editing, and producing can add up to thousands of dollars in labor costs alone, and Youtube (or similar hosting services) not only share none of that expense, but using them requires transferring the end product to a third-party, which can monetize it, give it away, or bury it without any consideration to the content producers. For the news sites, it's better to sacrifice user experience in the name of having complete control over the content.",
"The best solution is to instead use HTML5 and MP4 video instead of the garbage they usually use.",
"Publishing on YouTube grants YouTube ownership rights to the content. Unless you have a written agreement that says otherwise. I'm guessing those agreements don't come cheap.",
"In order to use YouTube to embed a video on their news site, they have to upload that video to YouTube. Once they upload that video to YouTube, it's available across URL_0 . Google makes the money from ads on URL_0 , sharing only a small part with the person who uploaded the video. The news organization sells the ads for their own website, keeping ALL the revenue. Therefore, the news site would like their video to appear on their own site but NOT across URL_0 Other video providers offer similar functionality as YouTube, even if you think the older is not as good, which allows the news organization to own the advertising and sometimes added features like better analytics or copy protection or regional targeting, etc. I wish YouTube would offer similar functionality and crush all these other companies, but that would be in some conflict with their primary business model, and so far they haven't chosen to go there."
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