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6f931s | Why do the vast majority of 8-bit (and some 16-bit) video games use the same font? | Referring to this: URL_0 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's because your fonts can only get so complex on such a low pixel count. It's a font with good thickness, visible curved corners, good contrast, and getting kerning to work will be a hassle. It's a good font, that's been on some good games, so it's a sort of accepted standard. What kind of font would YOU design for it?"
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6f9ah7 | When a camera's shutter speed syncs with moving tires and makes it look like the tires aren't spinning, what exactly is happening? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The camera is basically taking a picture of the tire when its at the exact point of rotation. If u put a yellow mark at the very top of the tire, you could synch the shutter to only flash when the mark is at the top on each rotation. So thats all you'll ever see. At the print shop i used to work at we would use handheld strobe lights that flashed only when the cyclinder that the spool of paper was on was at the exact point of rotation, so i coulld stand there and look at 1000 sjeets of paper but it seemed like i was only looking at a single sheet."
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6f9ecy | How do famous people and businesses get their specific usernames on social media? | For example, on Instagram, Reddit's official account is @reddit. I assume someone else had that username before them though? As in, before Instagram was popular enough for businesses to use someone probably saw @reddit was free and chose it. How do these businesses/people get these usernames? Do they either pay the person who owns the account enough to give it to them, submit a request to the social network claiming that they are infringing their trademark etc, or something else? Examples include: @snoopdogg @mileycyrus @nickiminaj @therock @arianagrande I hope my question is clear enough. Thanks :) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have social media teams that are on that quite fanatically. Whenever a new platform opens up they will register the name. This doesn't always work though. In that case they will often try to buy the account. My brother's instagram account is a play on his name that matches a popular fashion designer. He was contacted a while back by them to ask if he was interested in selling the account to them."
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6f9j9z | Why are social media sites like Twitter unable to stop bots that spread & up-rank misinformation? Could machine learning/AI be used to ID non-human accounts? | SSIA - Thanks!! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You could, and they are. But machine learning isn't magic. It's just statistics. And the bot makers are pretty good about finding out what features the machine learning is checking to identify bots and making their bots not do those things. Machine learning is not able to come up with additional checks on the fly, so it becomes a cat-and-mouse game between the bot makers and the team at twitter trying to figure out what new things to check for."
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6f9qds | why do chip card transactions take so much longer to process than magnetic strip transactions? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's an Infrastructure Issue. Chip Cards have added Security Features. These features are meant to make forging a Chip Card *incredibly* difficult, even if you manage to get a Skimmer working for them. However, more complex security features require more Computer Processing to verify and authorize. The Chip Cards are new, and they're running on the older hardware made for Swipe Cards. This hardware isn't fast enough to do Chip Cards as quickly. You've basically traded some Time for Security. Chip Card Transactions *will* become faster as the Infrastructure is improved. It's just a matter of waiting for companies to get that Infrastructure set up.",
"Do you have contactless payment with debit cards in the USA yet? Just touch the machine with the card and beep, 3 seconds on wifi it's approved? Anything up to £29.99 is pin free. Guaranteed by the banks. Works a treat in U.K.",
"You're right, chip cards do take longer. According to the [Chicago Tribune]( URL_0 ) here's why: > The delay is due to the added security features, the primary reason for using the technology. Specifically, the chip in the card is generating a unique encrypted message between the store and the bank's network.... All of this is more secure than the old slide-card technology",
"As a cashier operations supervisor, I get this complaint a lot. I had a feeling it was a myth. So I actually timed about 50 transactions from the moment the card was swiped or inserted, depending on type. Assuming their is no \"user error,\" they take about the same amount of time. Thing is, the consumer actually pays attention to the card reader while the card is in a chip reader so they don't forget their card. With a swipe, the consumer can swipe and forget. The \"extra time\" is an illusion.",
"Two reasons: 1.) Chip cards encrypt the information. Think of it as a code, it takes a while to take a normal message and turn it into a coded message. It also takes a while for someone else to decode the message. It would be a lot faster just to write the message out in plain text and then give it the other person, but if anyone grabbed it, they would be able to read that message. 2.) Chip cards have a secret handshake. Now that the message has been encrypted, before handing it to the other person, they first must verify that the person they are handing it to actually is the person they say they are. This is done by a secret handshake between the chip card and the person. This secret handshake takes time to do.",
"In the U.K. Under a set amount all you need to do is tap your card on the terminal and it's done about 3 second.",
"Mag stripe is an info dump. Machine reads the stripe, grabs what it needs, then throws that up to the processor who gives the thumbs up or thumbs down. Chip and Pin is more complex. Behind the chip there is a computer, and the computer needs to encrypt the message. Due to this there are two trips that need to be done to the processor. So in short, there's more going on when you use EMV (Chip and Pin) than with a mag stripe. This more stuff takes more time."
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6f9t8r | How do these "camera shutter speed synced to _____" gifs have only 1 part of the video different? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Camera shutters occur at constant frequency. Now if something in the picture is also operating at the same frequency, then that portion of the image appears to stand still. Things that spin or have a refresh rate are common candidates for this effect."
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6faf7d | how the Akinator Web Genie is able to guess people so accurately. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's just an electronic version of 20 Questions. Three points are enough to determine a location in space. Determining a famous person only takes a few more pieces of information. Plus it incorporates the information from when it fails to identify someone.",
"It uses an algorithm called a Naive Bayesian Classifier. It looks like AI, but it's not, it's pure statistics with a large training dataset. It starts dumb and it learns from every interaction, gradually building the probability of n-grams (groups of 2, 3, 4, n words) resulting in a specific output. It's actually a pretty simple algorithm, easy to implement by even beginner developers. There is a pretty good explanation here if you're interested in the maths: URL_0"
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6fbl3j | Why do battery powered items (such as phones and portable chargers) frequently arrive about half charged? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Keeping a battery at about half charge is good for long term storage, leading to less deterioration than 100% or very low percentage. LiPo batteries are also more susceptible to fires during transit if at full charge. Batteries can also drain over time, depending on what kind of circuitry they have hooked to them. Charging and under voltage protection is a common drain."
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6fc8nf | What makes AMD graphics cards so popular for cryptocurrency mining, and why does it matter? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are generally a good deal cheaper than Nvidia cards and for a good while now the architecture That AMD has been using (GCN aka graphics core next) turns out is really good for mining operations and better than Nvidia. So it makes sense for miners to use AMD since the cards are cheaper and they get better mining performance with AMD cards. So they make more money and cover their investment faster.",
"The basic economics of Crytocurrency mining comes down to some simple (ish) math - real money earned per unit time versus the cost of the power, and the average lifetime of the hardware used. So say a 100 dollar GPU will on average survive long enough to produce 200 dollars in Crypto currency, but in that time it will take 50 dollars in electrical power. Net gain, 50 dollars. So the more complex discussion is around Bitcoin specifically and China (and to a lesser extent Russia and Iran and a few other places). In that case, and as is generally the case with bitcoin, the largest use of the currency is to evade government currency controls (where countries simply don't let you buy other currencies in large amounts), evade sanctions (where US and EU companies aren't allowed to sell stuff). Since both of these are hugely important activities to the right people - in the case of China particularly rich people with ties to the government, who are using it to enrich themselves and get money out of the country and import stuff they can't get otherwise. For those guys and with bitcoin in particular there is and was a significant financial motive, and to do it, they were and are willing to spend a lot of money, in many cases on custom hardware that is supposed to be really fast at the crypto math for their particular problem. So enter etheum and other cryptocurrencies, and enter the world of ASIC's and semiconductor foundries and yields etc. Hardware built specifically for bitcoin may not be easily repurposed (or repurposed at all) to other cryptocurrencies, and lots of people are very wary of problems with bitcoin in terms of scaling and in terms of who is in control of the currency supply and decisions about what happens with scaling. And as much as custom ASIC's aren't too bad, they need to be designed and manufactured, and if that's a custom job that adds costs. AMD, or more accurately Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung and Globalfoundries (and Intel) are constantly improving their manufacturing processes, doubling performance roughly every 2 years - moore's law - If you bought a custom ASIC 4 years ago that was twice as fast as the general purpose graphics cards, well, guess what, today's GPU's might be twice as efficient/fast especially if your ASIC supplier can't or won't make what you want when you need it. TSMC, Samsung, etc don't want to talk to you if you don't want to buy a few billion dollars in components per year. The total value of bitcoins in the world is something like 42 billion dollars, TSMC does 30 billion dollars in business a year, bitcoin is too small for them to care unless you have a big order. So semiconductor manufacturing is getting better constantly, as is ASIC work, but ASIC's are expensive and if you need to replace them often they lose a lot of their economic value. So that's where AMD comes in, their graphics cards happen to be better at the raw floating point math cryptocurrencies require than say nvidia GPU's are. While cryptocurrency mining and gaming have similar requirements, particularly graphics crunching where you're working on 4 vector blocks of 32 bits each (so 128 bits at a time) to do all of your processing, gaming has much more memory dependent behaviour (since the same things stay on screen at a given time), and gaming you can take chunks of the world or chunks of the screen and work on those somewhat independently on each pass, crypto mining doesn't have a lot of need to retain data. Gaming also allows a level of imprecision in math (notably when doing decimal division) where a 0.001% error in values isn't a problem, oh no, that red is 0.001% not red enough! Cryptomining doesn't really tolerate that sort of thing. (Nvidia actually have their own fast math modes in GPU Programming you can use, or not, and for video game rendering it's perfectly reasonable, for scientific simulation or crytomining it wouldn't be). Along with that, of course are the fluctuation in the price of cyrptocurrencies, in march mining ethereum wouldn't have been even remotely profitable on AMD hardware, but now it is. This is of course the sort of thing where people in certain countries might be willing to take a loss in their own currency to be able to buy foreign currency (remember, a lot of the big players in this are trying to get money out of the country or to avoid taxes and evade sanctions, even 0 apparent gain is worth quite a lot to them). That's much less common in this day and age, but you used to see people on the street offering you much more for US dollars than the official bank exchange rate in India or China for example, because US dollars were restricted by the government.",
"To expand on /u/HeavyDT's answer: Bitcoin (and generally, any coin using SHA-256 as its proof of work) benefits more from a larger number of lower-power cores able to work in parallel. AMD's cards have this; NVIDIA's don't."
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6fcbkq | Why are there new socket types for almost every CPU generation | Is there any benefit to it ? I mean, I get it that CPUs themselves are faster, but does the actual socket (for eg. LGA 1151 vs 1150) offer any additional benefits over its counterpart ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Modern CPUs have a **lot** of things built into the chip. You've got memory controllers, PCI Express controllers, USB controllers, graphics chips and all sorts of other things. Motherboards need to be designed to interface with all of these things properly. If the chip changes, you need to redesign motherboards & having different pinouts makes sure there's no confusion. In years past, when a CPU was just a CPU & the motherboard chipset handled all those other features, it was much easier to share a CPU socket between generations of processors. Back in the Pentium 2/Pentium 3 era, there were several major revisions of the CPU that could all work with the chipsets on *Slot 1* boards and, even after Intel upgraded to *Socket 370*, they were still *logically* identical so a Socket 370 CPU could be put into an adapter board and run in a Slot 1 motherboard without a problem.",
"Consumer friendly design means that if it fits mechanically, it should work electrically. There are a few technology improvements between the two devices you mention. The most obvious example: LGA1151 devices support DDR4 memory, while LGA1150 devices do not. Many LGA1151 motherboards only have DDR4 slots. If they allowed LGA1150 devices to fit into a DDR4-only motherboard, a lot of people would end up with a CPU that can't work with their memory and they'll be cursing intel for it."
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6fcco0 | Why are "Sign In" buttons on websites so small and presented with less fanfare than "Sign Up" buttons? | It would seem like they want to make signing in easier to find or make it seem like they value their users, no? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is more important to attract new customers. A returning customer is more likely to endure a minor annoyance than someone looking to sign up. And many times, it remembers that you signed in anyway, so you may rarely have a returning customer actually looking for the sign in area. Plus if they are returning customers they might already be accustomed with the layout, and not have an issue finding it."
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6fcroz | How does Google actually work? | More generally maybe how does such large scale data mining take place? Is it through hash tables or through bots that amass a data base? How can google search the entire internet in seconds and pull every single reference to what you searched for ever? I guess no one will ever know surely given that it is google but just curious. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> More generally maybe how does such large scale data mining take place? Is it through hash tables or through bots that amass a data base? Hash tables are involved, and yes, the first step is that web crawlers download all of the content from the web and store it in a massive database. > How can google search the entire internet in seconds and pull every single reference to what you searched for ever? By building an index. It's actually not that different than how the index in a textbook works. Suppose you open a Chemistry textbook and you want to find the main chapter on covalent bonds, you'd go to the table of contents. But suppose you wanted to find every page that ever mentions covalent bonds - you'd go to the index and it will tell you exactly which pages mention that term at all. Google, and every other search engine, works the same way. As it crawls the web, it takes every word it finds and adds it to its index. That way when you search for a word like narwhal, it just has to check the index, and it instantly knows all of the pages that talk about narwhals. Creating the index doesn't have to be real-time. It should be fast, but it doesn't have to be almost instant. But once the index is done, using the index is really, really fast. That's actually the *easy* part, although doing it really, really fast requires some excellent engineering work over the whole system, from data center design to software engineering. The hard part is actually *ranking* all of the possible results. That's where Google excels, even today. > I guess no one will ever know surely given that it is google but just curious. Google's founders actually published a paper explaining the core idea behind Google's ranking algorithm, called PageRank, way back in 1998: URL_0 Since then, Google has published dozens of other papers explaining how their technology works. Obviously they don't publish all of the secret details, and they stay ahead of what they've published, but they don't keep it a secret. Note that knowing how Google works isn't sufficient to create your own search engine that's just as good. Google may have started small but it now has a massively large database and millions of computers. It'd be almost impossible to create a similarly good search engine without a huge investment to collect enough data and process it.",
"Google search has two parts: crawling to build the index, and the ranking algorithm to get a searcher their results. The index is just a big database built by 'bots' or 'spiders'. A bot is just a piece of software that starts with a web page and examines it. The bot notes its content, and any links on the page. This is called crawling, or scraping. The bot stores the content in the index, and then works its way through the links on the page, visiting each in turn and repeating the process. So, the index is a huge database of content and links. It stores where the content can be found, and what it's about. It also stores all the links it found, and for each piece of content, it stores all the links that point to it. The ranking algorithm is what gets triggered when you google for 'kitten wrapped in bacon'. It looks through the index looking for all the bacon-wrapped, baby cat content that it's got stored and then sorts it to try and show you the most useful results. It does that by sorting the results based on a lot of different things, including: how closely it thinks the pages match your search; which pages other people chose when doing the same search; where in the world you're searching from; the language your browser is set to; etc. There are supposed to be over 200 different things that Google considers when ordering the results. So Google *doesn't* search the entire internet in seconds. It has a huge number of bots (an different types as well, which look, and index, for different things) which build a massive database. The algorithm searches the massive database in seconds and lists the results it finds depending on a whole bunch of things. Edit: punctuation"
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6fd637 | how is a website's price calculated? | For example, a little static website without CMS vs a little dynamic website with CMS and Database. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"OK, so if you mean *how does one work out how much it costs to host a website?* The main factors are: * storage * how many requests (visitors) the website needs to be able handle per hour * whether or not the website needs to be able to handle variable data (CMS) or just serve static pages (although this is largely down to what you need the site to do specifically, as either way it's a request from the server.) If you mean *Why should I pay so much for a website to be designed?* The main factors are: * The complexity of the website. * What you need the website to be able to do. (E-Commerce is more complicated than a blog, which in turn is more complicated than a static page with a gif of a donkey on it.) * Both of the above factor into how much time is required to complete the site. * Revisions and changes aren't (usually) free."
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6fdw40 | Why do most live performers remove their in ear moniters when they perform? If it affects their performance, why do they wear it in the first place? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> As a professional musician for over a decade, the simple answer is this: In-ear monitors are excellent for keeping a fine tuned ear on what is being played, hearing click tracks, and getting cues. When someone takes out one (or sometimes both) of their in-ears, it's to either REALLY hear the ambient sounds around them, more accurately hear the crowd, or just as often, simply get a break from the (necessary) loudness directly in their ear. Actively listening to what's piped into your in-ears is what keeps musicians on key/on tempo. Taking them out gives them a break from the audio assault, and lets them engage with their actual surroundings instead of being in an isolated audio environment. From /u/jayrobhearthrob 's reply. It deserves to be a top level post but he says he doesn't know how to Reddit, so I'm helping."
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6fh32q | How does lighting in a concert interfere with musical equipment? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Although LEDs and other technologies are becoming more commonplace and have their own funky ways of dimming them built in, a lot of stage lighting still uses a variant of the old fashioned filament bulb that you might have in any number of lights at home, assuming you've not fitted some sort of energy saving bulb anyway. The most common way of dimming these is with a device called a triac. A triac is a sort of electronic switch. When we dim a light, what we actually do is use the triac to cut the power to it for short periods of time (fractions of a second). Because the filament in the bulb stays hot enough to continue glowing for the short periods where there's now power our eyes don't see the periods where there's no power being applied, but the effect is that in all we're pumping less power into the light, and it's therefore less bright. Now, the problem here is that every time we cut the power or put it back in, it causes a little spike of current to appear on the electrical system. If we've got sound gear attached to the same supply as dimmers, then these spikes that are coming from our dimmers can cause interference in the sound kit."
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6fhybs | Why can some computers run PC games without meeting the minimum requirements, while other games perform like garbage on the same computer even though their requirements are overall lower? | Curious for myself, but I see a lot of other gamers with this, too. Some games I don't meet the spec requirements for tend to run better and with a higher frame rate than those I do meet. Ex: I can play skyrim pumped full of mods on decent settings when I don't meet *any* system requirements, but when I try to play something like minecraft, terraria, or another game with considerably lower requirements it chugs like molasses and is nigh unplayable? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The requirements for a game are basically a marketing tool. There's no clear performance criteria a system must meet for a game to have minimal requirements listed. It's completely up to the publisher's discretion. Put the requirements too high, and people won't buy. Put them too low, and people will be disappointed. And if your game is hot enough, people might upgrade to hit the min requirements in some cases.",
"The interaction between a game a the CPU/GPU is pretty complicated. It isnt really just about if the speed/ghz/mips/memory/etc are enough anymore, but how well the games inner workings are taking advantage of the chips architecture. Triple A titles and popular game engines like Unreal have put a great deal of work into optimizing that relationship for as broad of an audience as possible (because there are so many GPU and CPU models out there). Indie games can often just be a single developer (at most a team of 5-10) and they just don't have the resources to optimize past some basic level of performance, or are working at a higher level using an off the shelf game engine. Also just because a company is big doesn't mean they are good at or put resources towards optimization. I play CSGO regularly, which I wouldn't consider very intense graphically. On medium settings the highest FPS I can get without drops is 90 on most maps. On nuke and some of the other refreshed maps I get very low drags in some areas, down to 20 and its unstable so its basically unplayable. Valve is a major company and the source engine has been around for over a decade, so who knows whats going on there. To contrast that I can play Bioshock Infinite on high settings and not notice any performance issues, and didn't have any issues with Overwatch on reasonable settings. Also, console game are different because the developers know _exactly_ what hardware they are developing for, so they only have to put effort into optimizing and testing for that combination."
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6fko8z | How do eBay scammers get hundreds of positive reviews? | Bought something on eBay recently, seller got shut down by eBay and my money refunded thankfully. However, they had 99% positive with nearly a thousand positive reviews, and only 10 negative. How do they do this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are services one can pay for to get fake reviews on ebay, Facebook, yell and so on. They use cheap labour in developing countries like China. I believe they are referred to as \"click farms\""
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6fmrrs | How Did They Code The First UI? | You can make programs through a Shell, but how did they make the first shell so you could program more stuff? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The answer is that the fist program on a new computer design is created on another computer design. It is called cross compiling and it is like how program for mobile phones are compiled on PCs. But then is the question how is the software for the first computer created? It was done by hand and the computer was programmed by connecting electrical wires or by manualy creating punch cards/punch tape",
"The first programs were made by flipping switches on the front of the giant computers. Later programs were made by punching holes in cards and feeding them into machines. It wasn't until decades after the first computer that people were able to write programs entirely on computers.",
"At the time, shells already existed on teletype terminals. These were essentially electric typewriters hooked up to a phone line or serial cable. What you typed didn't go to a screen, but onto a paper spool. The running gag is when someone writes something followed by \\^H\\^H\\^H\\^H, the terminal output to disregard the last 4 characters, in this case. The video terminal was an experimental peripheral at the time, and someone programmed a UI for it, and they didn't even have to use a teletype terminal to do it! Back then, punch cards were still very popular, and people could have written the first UI strictly in punch cards, bypassing the teletype entirely. I wasn't there at Xerox Parc, so I don't know if this is actually how it was done or not."
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6fnybc | How were people able to play a game like 'World of Warcraft' back in 2004, when the average internet speed was around 350 kb/second? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't know about WoW specifically, but for a lot of games of the era, they just handled a lot more of the things client side, and your computer and the server just communicated in short bits of binary. All of the graphics are stored on your computer, and the server just need to send a single byte to tell your computer which way a certain character moved and what not and your computer would render it itself.",
"Your maximum download speed doesn't affect your latency. A game like World of Warcraft doesn't use that much bandwidth, but it relies a lot more on ping times.",
"350kbps? That's a data firehose compared to Phantasy Star Online or Ragnarok Online over dial-up. To make a scenario like this work, you need to two things. 1. Squeeze as many details into every byte as you can. 2. Send as little information as possible, and let the players' computers figure out the rest. Let's say the game knows the list of actions (magic, trade, strike/attack, etc), and those are all numbered. And there's a list of users, and those are all numbered. You could so something like send a signal saying something like \"2,13,5,14\" and that means that action number 2 (cast magic) is being performed by player number 13 on this map (bizitmap), and he's casting spell number 5 (ice) on player number 14 (DeefaHS). Because you decided on a set of rules ahead of time, you can fit a lot in a little. It's up to the game to fill in the details. Where's bizitmap? Where's Deefa? What does the icebolt animation look like? It should already know all that, so it figures it out for itself how to make a blue bolt move on the screen from one player to the other. Another way to keep data usage down is to update less often. Every player has the coordinate they're standing at on a map. I move my guy. He doesn't **immediately** update the server with his new spot, the game waits a few milliseconds to bother. And it doesn't send my walking path, JUST hwere I'm standing now. All the other computers get told my new location and have to animatate my guy on their screens walking on their own based on that update. This is all kinda generalized examples, but hopefully it helps context."
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6foau7 | How does tilt-shifting photography work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"With normal photography the lens is centered and perpendicular to the film or sensor. Tilt shift means the lens can be tilted off perpendicular and shifted off center. Since lenses are designed to put objects in focus directly behind their glass elements, that allows the photographer to shift how the focal plane intersects the film or sensor. Traditionally this was used to have both very near and very distant objects in focus. This was done by [tilting the lens so that the focal plane was more in line with the subject]( URL_0 ). More recently it's become trendy to shift the other way, creating a narrow band of in focus objects and blurring nearer and more distant objects. When this is done especially from a certain angle, it creates a strong illusion of a miniature scene (all lenses, even the lens in our eye, can only have a narrow band of focus when focused on very close objects)."
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6foitf | When listening to music, it sometimes feels like I'm hearing it faster or slower than before? | Sometimes I get the sense that I'm hearing a song slower or faster than the last time I heard it. Any idea why? Or can there actually be variance in output depending on device i.e. streaming, radio in the car, etc. Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sometimes we feel euphoric when listening to really good songs, the brain releases dopamine, adrenaline, and other chemicals. These chemicals can enhance and change how we experience the song, it can seem faster, slower, smoother, louder and so forth. By listening to a song too often your brain no longer feels rewarded when listening to it, it has become predictable. You then experience the song without the effects of these chemicals. It might seem 'slower' than before."
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6fp3xl | what is the difference between a Fast Charger and a standard USB wall adapter? Looking at their outputs, they look close to the same. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a few different standards out there, and some manufacturers calling anything that can provide > 1a @5v \"fast\". Qualcomm Quick Charge uses a higher voltage along the USB cable while keeping current about the same. USB[-C] power delivery supports a similar higher voltage scheme, but also allows 5v@3a along C-C cables."
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6fprer | How do police identify the criminals by using CCTV | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cop here: We know most of the scumbags in our area. If we don't recognize someone from a video, we'll send an email out asking if anyone else does. 90% of the time we'll get an email back saying, \"Yeah, that's Larry Johnson. He likes to break into cars\". That's how it's done in my department.",
"\"Wait! Zoom and enhance!\" \"You do know an image only has so much resolu-\" \"Dammit man! Just do it!\" \"Ok sir!\"",
"Sort of related fun fact: If you look on the door frame of any convenience store/gas station, you'll see a strip run up the sides with numbers that indicate height from the ground. This can give height of the perp, a key identification detail"
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6fq3m3 | How are old media formats 'remastered'? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The studios keep master copies, which are actually pretty high-quality. The low-quality problem on older movies is from the poorer transmission and distribution standards of back then. Film reels and cable broadcasting are low-quality, film movie cameras aren't. They go back to the studio, and render the master copies into digital. On songs, layers of the recording are kept apart on the master copies. Drums are on a different track than vocals. They can enhance each individually."
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6fr6i2 | Differences/relationship between computer kernel and shell | What exactly is each responsible for and how do they interact with eachother? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The kernel is the core of the operating system. It defines what users & processes are, it controls access to hardware, it handles multitasking and networking and pretty much everything that actually happens. The shell is just tool that lets you interact with the kernel & execute other programs."
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6frkuy | Why back in early 2000 Motherboards were green, and now they are mostly black. Why the color change and why aren't we seeing any pink motherboards? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Back in those days we didn't have fancy windowed PC cases. Once those modded cases and windows popped up the manufacturers started to built visually appealing components. E.g. fancy RAM heatsinks, nice motherboards, PSUs and so on. Wouldn't there be such cases as today, I believe we would have stayed with boring, cheap green motherboards and RAM modules, etc."
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6fuybn | how Artificial Intelligence works in terms of programming? | ###Fantastic answers from all you guys. THANKS! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Artificial intelligence is a massive field. Asking how AI works is like asking how animals work. Don't let the down votes dissuade you, though. It's an interesting, expanding field. If you have 25 mins to spare, this is a nice video on the topic: URL_1 Edit: it's worth pointing out that neural networks as discussed in this video are just one field in AI, but I think this a nice introduction to the whole field. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong (with useful links to share!) Edit 2: might as well throw in a link to [carykh's channel]( URL_0 )",
"Let's say that you have a set of marbles that are of different weights from 10 to 50 grams (totally made up values here, no idea what a marble actually weighs). Now let's suppose that you want to find only the marbles that weight between 18 grams and 20 grams. Of course, we don't want to do this by hand since we have a lot of marbles so instead what we'll do is make something that can make the decision for us. In this case, we create a path by cutting a groove into a piece of wood that all of the marbles can fit down. Now, we put in a trap door that only marbles that weight 18 grams or more can fall through and into a new path. We're half way there! Now the problem is that the marbles that are too heavy will fall through so we need another trapdoor to only catch the marbles that weigh 21 grams but allow the others to flow through into a bucket at the end of the path. This bucket will now contain only marbles weighing between 18 and 20 grams. We would test it by having a test set of marbles where only red ones should end up in the bucket and any other color is incorrect. After the testing, we would make adjustments to the trapdoors so that only the correct marbles get through. This is called training. So, in computers, machine learning is exactly this where the trapdoors are nodes that have certain weights applied to them. If the input passes a certain threshold (the marble is in the right weight range), then the node passes the value onto a certain pathway for further execution. If we find out that the output isn't what correct, then we go back in and work on the nodes / weighting (trapdoors) so that it works with values that we know to be correct. This is a very broad topic and this is a super simplified answer which I hope clarifies it for you.",
"There are two broad categories for AI: Decision problems and search/optimization problems. Examples of decision problems: * Given this state of a chess game, which of the available moves should white make? * Given this huge body of medical data and this patient's symptoms, what diseases is he likely to have? * Given this huge body of historical weather data and the current weather, what's the weather going to be tomorrow? There are a lot of different systems that are used to try to make these decisions. For games with turns, like chess, it's usually based around evaluating the state of the game at each move to give a score for each player, exploring all of the possible paths the game could take, and choosing the move that maximizes the score. For things like the medical example, imagine picking two types of data and plotting them in a scatterplot. For example, age on one axis and BMI on the other. People with diabetes are generally older, fatter people, so we expect to see diabetics in the top right. Of course, there are a lot more variables with medical data, so in reality it would be some 50-dimensional scatterplot or something. There are then lots of different approaches to try to cluster data or draw lines between different groups. See: decision trees, support vector machines (SVMs), and clustering. Examples of search/optimization problems: * Solve this Sudoku puzzle * Given this road data of the entire world, find a good driving route between LA and NYC * Given the entire internet and this search text, find web pages that are relevant * There's going to be a convention with a lot of talks. Given this convention center and its rooms and their capacities, and all of the talks and their lengths and projected attendances, figure out how to put it all together. The Sudoku puzzle is the only one with a definite \"right\" answer. You write a search algorithm that methodically tries all numbers in all open boxes, *forward propagating* to see if what you've done is still possible, and *backtracking* when there's a conflict. The driving one is a little fuzzier, but you can still tell that an answer is at least correct. There are various graph search algorithms, but they're all based around the idea of exploring all possibilities outwards from the start, focusing attention on the ones that are doing \"well\", and throwing out ones that are clearly not working. See: A\\*, Dijkstra's algorithm. Web search is really complicated. Early search engines just looked for pages containing your search text, which allowed people to put a bunch of invisible text on the page to increase result rank. Google made a key observation: pages relevant to the search don't just contain the text, but other pages link to them as a reference. So when you search \"dog\", you're not just looking for pages that contain \"dog\", you're looking for pages that sites about dogs link to. And that's why Wikipedia is usually a top hit. Google's full algorithm is much more complicated and a tightly-guarded secret, but that's the gist of it.",
"When I bought took post grad ai course I asked my professor: \"these algorithms are great but how do you get the computer to ask the question\" Most AI is merely analytics attempting to solve a question we have defined. Which, isn't really intelligent",
"There is no one answer to this question as it is overly broad. \"Artificial Intelligence\" is a goal of simulating an intelligence, not a single technique or calculation. It is like asking \"How does building bridges work?\" The general goal is to bridge some gap but how precisely that is designed or implemented varies widely. Every design has benefits and weaknesses, and each kind fails at some point. Similarly every AI has different methods of design, different strengths and weaknesses, and none are perfect.",
"One thing to understand is that there are no *true* AI as the average person thinks of them. Computers are not capable of actual learning at this time, they are only capable of executing a program. We have gotten better at programming and we can program to make them appear to be learning, but in the end it is just executing a program. A great example of this is some of the \"AI\" that can \"learn\" chess by playing people. All this is, is a program that plays chess, stores the information about what moves occurred during each game, and then the outcomes of those sequence of moves. It then learns that in situation X, it won 60% of games where it made Y move. It is technically learning, but it can never do anything else other than calculate and apply the probability based on its original programming."
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6fv2an | Why is it impossible for PS1 games to be HD remastered? Is it not possible to just redo the textures? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Former game dev here, It's not impossible, there's just no profit in it for the amount of work involved. The studio would be selling to a tiny niche who would want such a thing, and they can't possibly charge enough to turn a profit at a price the market will tolerate. On the technical side, game code for a console is incredibly specific to that console. What you suggest would require a near complete rewrite from scratch of these games, and recreation of all art assets - which would require a full scale dev team to port to a modern platform. That, and not only would the code have to be ported, but redesigned to work with modern graphics on this other, modern platform. And then you would of course require full scale play testing to find and fix bugs and ensure the game experience is faithful to the original. It costs ~$10m to make a low end AAA title, and these ports will cost at least as much, likely ~$20m per title. And if you're going to improve the video quality, it's inadequate to go with an incremental improvement, you might as well go all the way, so the effort required would be demanding, escalating the price. Anything less than what is expected for an exalted title on a modern platform would be a complete market flop. And again, this is for a niche market. Buyers don't buy the same experience again, unless you're Nintendo.",
"It's not impossible, it's just incredibly expensive and time consuming. Besides the fact that re-doing the textures takes a lot of effort, you also have to re-create all of the models. The original models were made up of very few polygons- much of the reason modern games look more natural is that they have more precise definitions of the characters, with more articulated joints (like fingers that move independently) and all of that takes a ton of time to create and animate.",
"\"HD Remasters\" are a lot more complicated than just increasing the polygon count and texture resolution. 9/10 times, they just re-create the game from scratch. And unless the game is super popular and will guarantee tons of sales, the dev won't do it because it won't make enough money. That's why only super popular games like the Crash series are getting HD remakes.",
"Making an old game look better is a lot more than just swapping in HD textures. Take a look at [this screen cap from the original Tomb Raider]( URL_0 ). There's not enough resolution in the world to make that look better."
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6fxqqe | Why are spam / phishing emails always so terribly written (e.g. grammar, spelling errors, etc)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I read somewhere that phishing/spam emails/online scams are intentional bad, slightly obvious. It weeds out the potentially more savvy victims that would spot a scam, making the pool of responders more likely to be less savvy/smart and more likely to fall for the scam, thereby decreasing wasted time on the scammers part and increasing the efficiency of their scamming operation.",
"Because stupid people are easier to con. If you're smart enough to see the mistakes, they don't want to waste time on you.",
"It makes it less likely to be caught by a spam filter. Spam filters know to look for things like \"Viagra\" or \"Nigerian prince\" but don't know to look for \"p3n1s PilIs!\" or \"0ld M8\" or any of the other myriad of ways to misspell words."
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6fy2xf | How does noise cancellation technology work in headphones | It is mysteriously glorious | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Destructive interference. Imagine sound being ocean waves that travel in direction towards you. If you were to create waves with equal wavelength and height to the incoming waves, and send them towards the waves that travel towards you, then the waves would cancel each other. That would cause sea where the waves are coming from would be completely flat. Sound waves work in a very similar way as ocean waves. Now imagine our hearing organ (the cochlea) as being a buoy that floats up and down in the water as waves pass, if you send out waves to meat the incoming waves at the same spot as the buoy is, then the buoy wouldn't move at all, and no sound would be detected. So basically noise canceling works by \"making the sound ocean\" flat, so that the buoy (our hearing organ) perceives it as there is no movement."
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6fy7bs | What are “non-free” packages in Linux? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Used in debian-style repositories and others, the non-free section refers to packages that do not have source code published under a \"free\" license. Such packages/software are distributed free of charge, but the source code is not available and/or users are not allowed to modify and create derivates of the code."
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6fyv8s | How does dry cleaning work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Dry cleaning isn't actually dry, it just uses a different solvent than water, usually Hydrocarbon. Other than that, the process is pretty much the same as any washing."
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6fzbas | Why does IBM Watson have so many commercials? (Who is the target?) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is mostly about branding *getting their name out there repeatedly over and over - so when you think of the best possible soda - Coke or Pepsi pops in your head. When you think of fast food - boom you think of mcdonalds or burger king When you think of getting an alternative taxi via cell phone - you think of uber or Lyft and they are trying to convince you that when you think of the possible database in the world - you automatically think of IBM WATSON -- as for who are they trying to get to buy the product - if they are really getting customers from running ads in primetime - they are likely looking for executives in major companies who make decisions what company they will use for their best possible computer based database in the world - boom they will think of IBM Watson. If you think of it - they may pay $50-100K to run the commercial during the big game - but if it results in getting a contract with a major company worth millions of dollars - it was a good investment. TLDR - they do it for branding and very expensive contracts with big companies"
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6g01e9 | What limits the transfer speed of data cables such as USB, HDMI, Ethernet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cables have electrical properties - some of which are well-known (resistance), some of which are not (capacitance, inductance). Capacitance is a particular problem because it limits the frequencies that can be transferred over a cable, thus limiting the data transfer speeds. An ELI5 explanation of capacitance goes something like this: it's the ability of a material to store charge. Electrons go in to and out of the material in response to the voltage on the line. When the voltage is alternating (which it has to be to transfer data), it means part of the voltage is delayed for a short time and comes back on to the line at the \"wrong\" time. The effect is to limit the frequency response. If you know how a \"tone\" or \"filter\" control on a HiFi or a guitar works, it's the same thing: when you turn it down, you're sending more voltage to a capacitor, and the high frequencies are reduced. With a tone control you want that effect, but in high speed data transmission, you don't.",
"USB 3.1 Gen 2 runs at up to 10 Gbps. Assuming you mean ethernet over the common twisted pair cables that most people mean when they say \"ethernet\" (even though that has nothing to do with what ethernet actually is), the fastest current standard is 40 Gbps (although 100 Gbps are already available in non \"BASE-T\" links) HDMI 2.1 is able to pass up to 48 Gbps. It should be noted that all of these speeds are theoretical maximum speeds in ideal conditions. At best, you'll get maybe 80% of that speed in the real world."
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6g09uf | What stops private entities from pursuing a weapon of mass destruction project? | So we have a guy that uses his privately earned money to fund his own space project. It only makes me wonder what stops Elon Musk as a visionary from starting his own nuclear project, build a base somewhere in Alaska, buy uranium from Iran and then threaten people with his nukes if they don't start playing by his definition of nice. What prevents this sort of scenario and how likely are we to see it happen at some point in the future? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are just a ridiculous amount of laws concerning the use of anything related to nuclear energy or weaponry. If theoretically he wanted to build unsanctioned private nuclear weaponry it would have to be completely secret. Which means he would have to somehow hide the base, personnel, materials, and paper /money trail from the federal government. It would be a monumental task, especially in an American state by an American company.",
"I just thought of this- How DID doctor evil get a laser built on the moon without anyone noticing?",
"It's simply not possible for a private enterprise to achieve on its own. You need state knowledge and infrastructure to make it work. First off, it's a lot more expensive than you think. Elon Musk has a lot of money. His net worth is about $16.7 billion dollars. The Manhattan Project, adjusted for inflation, cost about $25 billion dollars, so even if Musk liquidated all of his assets, he still would come up short, and that's not to mention that the only reason SpaceX is successful in the first place is because of huge investments by the US government. Second, it's lot harder on a technical level than just getting some uranium. Not only do you need the materials and infrastructure, but you also need the scientific knowledge, which is some of the most closely guarded information in the world. So what would this hypothetical evil genius billionaire have to do? First they would need to obtain vast quantities of uranium. Then build a huge plant of centrifuges to enrich it into a usable form, or alternatively build a reactor to turn it into plutonium. Then he'd have to hire hundreds if not thousands of workers to operate the plants. Then he'd need a team of the best physicists in the world to work out the math, or the best spies in the world to steal it from a nation that already has it. This would all have to be done in *complete secret*. How likely would this be in the future? I can't know for sure, but given how much effort it takes, it seems highly unlikely. A more likely (although how *much* more likely I can't speculate) is for a person or organization to steal a bomb from a nation with lax security, or to steal/buy some weapons-grade material to make a crude device of their own.",
"> So we have a guy that uses his privately earned money to fund his own space project. He still has to get clearance from the US government before he can launch anything (FAA specifically). > buy uranium from Iran and then threaten people with his nukes if they don't start playing by his definition of nice. It is HARD to buy fissile material and even harder to refine it to weapons grade. and even HARDER to do it all without anybody finding out because... > What prevents this sort of scenario All of the governments in the world. No government wants other *governments* to have nukes, they will NOT just sit idly by as a rogue element makes Weapons of Mass Destruction in their own backyard. > how likely are we to see it happen at some point in the future? North Korea is already doing and has been doing it for the better part of a decade. Iran signed an agreement saying NOT to do it anymore. People said that Iraq *might* be doing it, and the resulting war is still going on. But a private individual? I would say it approaches 0%. If someone **really** wanted to work on the Manhatten Project, then they would have to join up with a government (like North Korea) to make it possible.",
"Are you familiar with the Apple EULA, OP?",
"Laws of countries stop that. Private countries do produce military weapons and sell them to the state, and even to other countries than where they are situated. But they do that under permission of the country. Elon could very well get contracted by the state to develop a weapon of mass destruction, but he can't just start doing that on his own accord because then the police would come and knock on his door and take him in. If he hid it in Alaska without the state knowing it, sure he could perhaps do that.. I'm sure there are quite a few terror organisations that would like to and even try to do that already in states that don't have control of their territory, hopefully they'll not be successful.",
"There have been private entities who have created weapons of mass destruction. URL_1 URL_0 And of course the terror attacks using Anthrax in 2001. WMD is labelled as Biological, Chemical, and Nuclear weapons. I'm looking at your question being more specific about why hasn't a private entity manufactured nuclear weapons and here is an answer. Weapon Grade Uranium is present in about .7% of all Uranium dug up. This weapon grade Uranium has to be strained (refined) from the other 99.3% of Uranium to a point of around 90%. It gets even harder though as there is another isotope that is crap that looks and is almost exactly the same. The good Uranium isotope is called 235 and the bad is called 238. Imagine them as identical twins. Now you have a picture of two identical twins so now imagine twin 238 has ate a fudge Sunday and weighs a fraction of an ounce heavier than the other. That is how the Uranium is filtered from the other by slowly and painfully trying to pull the slightly nearly almost as heavy identical twin from the other one. As you can imagine that is really really energy intensive and expensive requiring a specific type of people who have been trained on how to do this. These people are also very limited and in high demand so trying to acquire them is going to draw a huge amount of attention. I have to go but I'll be back to finish up later.",
"Loyalty. Not of the company to anyone, but rather its employees. Consider you were a nuclear scientist and Bill Gates approached you for help in his nuclear program. Bill Gates has 2 things to offer: 1) money, and 2) He is actually a good guy doing good things in the world and you could well feel like you innately want to help him out. The problem is, as you hear Bill's plans for the nuclear weapon as the months tick by, or as you don't hear his plans, you start to become concerned with his moral authority. Most of the original atomic bomb scientists had massive ethical misgivings about what they were doing even for the USA during WW2. So at some point, one of the hundreds of people involved in this project, is going to have a crisis of conscience and they are going to realise that money is their motivation for continuing. Not a problem, bill gates is super rich right? Not compared to the United States Federal Government. And the USA has also never been shy about using huge sums of money to get the outcome it wants. Bill Gates could pay you millions, or tens of millions (he has a lot of people to pay after all and he can't afford to give everyone a billion bucks). The US could pay you hundreds of millions. If you went to the CIA and said \"Listen, I can prove a private corporation within the united states is currently building an atomic bomb for use against nation states, and I'll spill the beans in exchange for 500 million bucks.\" The CIA would make it happen. Fuck they would make it happen knowing that they would in fact turn a profit on the deal because whoever is doing this, they are going to seize every penny of their assets and they have to be worth more than 500 million if they are trying to build a nuke. So really, it just comes down to loyalty."
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6g1oe6 | Is it really possible for a person or entity to get precise information, such as your street location, from your IP address? | Hi everyone. I've heard this a couple of times now and I'm not sure what to believe. My understanding was that the most a person could do with an IP address was find the city you live in. Precise information like street location could only be obtained from an ISP. Now I'm not so sure. Could anyone explain this? Thanks. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not really possible with just the IP. You can use it to get a rough approximation of your location - my IP address points to my town but to my ISP's location and not to my house. You can get a little more detailed with the hostname depending on what your ISP sets it to. A hostname is basically a text label that whoever manages your IP applies to it. When I lived on campus, the campus IT department marked each IP with a hostname that explicitly identified what building in the graduate student apartment complex you lived in - each building had only four apartments. That was fun to learn.",
"A single IP cannot locate you. However cross reference the IP with other information may be more than enough. Suppose you had hacked Facebook. Or Hotmail or Gmail. You can now look up that IP in Facebook's logs and find any matches for that IP. Chances are thats the same person. If you're a bit less ambitious than hacking Facebook, then you could look up the already hacked systems that data has been published for. Like the Sony hacks. Or the bank of America hacks."
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6g3hdz | Why do old television clips look so bad? Was standard definition TV really that bad? | I remember watching football games in the 80s and 90s on TV and the quality seemed ok, but when they show old highlights from that era on HD it looks completely unwatchable. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The quality was arguably very good, but there are not many good archives from that time so anything you see most likely comes from a VHS tape, or similar, which might be a recording of the transmission and not even an original/master. VHS tapes can degrade over time. Also the old, smaller image is being stretched to fit a much larger area, so artifacts will appear. The same thing happens to small images scaled up in photoshop for example, pixels become blocky as a little information has to cover a larger space.",
"Analog recording technology is your real culprit, not just that it's standard definiton. The secret sauce to digital (and the big drive to use it) is that you can re-transmit and re-store digital recordings a zillion times and it's accurate to the original source. Not so with analog. You lost quality every time you broadcast it again, recorded it again, or let it sit on the shelf a while. So that 20-30 year old footage has not been done any favors by time. Re-broadcasting, being recorded from the airwaves, and just plain not-as-good-but-the-best-we-had-back-then analog equipment couldn't produce the same results we can now."
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6g4213 | What stops telephone companies from being able to identify and block robocallers (including ones who use caller ID scrambling)? | With all the other things computers are capable of doing these days, this would seem to be a feature that could be developed and implemented by Verizon or TMobile or whomever. That said, I'm definitely not an expert on this kind of technology, to the point where I'm not even sure I'm phrasing the question properly. But I'd be interested in, say, if a rising exec at TMobile wanted to introduce a service or feature like this, would it even be technologically possible? Or is that simply not the way the phone networks work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I test a corporate phone system as my job. They can't stop robo-callers because: 1) Content and intent are not included in the routing information. 2) Legitimate businesses use Automated systems for valid purposes, let letting customers know special order or packages have arrived for pickup. 3) It's super easy to spoof the origin in routing information. 4) They'd risk a lawsuit for blocking legal communication service they are being paid to provide if they try to block a specific outgoing physical line."
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6g4pij | How do tow trucks take away cars without setting off the car alarm?? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most factory alarms don't have shock sensors. So as long as the doors or hood aren't opened they won't go off from being towed.",
"They don't really. Most car's with standard alarms usually won't have fancy tilt / shock sensors so getting towed won't set off the alarm. The cars that do well all it does is make the tow truck drivers learn how to be quick. In most places the law is that once they get your car hooked up they don't have to let it down from a legal stand point. So if a car alarm does go off it's just gonna make the tow driver hustle faster to take your car honestly."
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6g62z0 | What is physically different about a hard drive with a 500 GB capacity versus a hard drive with a 1 TB capacity? Do the hard drives cost the same amount to produce? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here's an analogy that a five year old might understand. Imagine you have a piece of paper. You get your crayon and divide the paper up into squares. In each square you can write a limited amount of information (for this example, let's say one letter), [like this]( URL_0 ). If you tried to write any more information in each square, it would be unreadable because the crayon is too thick to write smaller letters. You can make more storage space by creating a book using more than one sheet of paper. The extra paper costs more money compared to using a single sheet. Another way to make more space is to replace your crayon with something smaller, and more expensive, like a pen. You [can see]( URL_1 ) that more information would fit on the sheet compared to when you were using a crayon. Once you've made your large storage device using multiple sheets of paper and a pen, you might want to make artificially smaller sizes (read about price discrimination for more on why you might want to do this). You can do this by removing some of the sheets, or by painting over some of your squares [like this]( URL_2 ). To get back to your original question: The physical differences are different numbers of platters (the sheets of paper in the analogy), and different density on each platter (the different writing sizes in the analogy). Whether they cost the same depends on how a manufacturer decides to produce their different sizes. If they use fewer platters, it might cost less to make a smaller drive. If there is no physical difference and they just disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives (painting over squares in the analogy), then all sizes will cost the same to produce.",
"There are differences usually, and it depends on the type of drive. Solid state drive use flash chips to store data. Larger drives either use more chips (up to the max that the controller can handle), or they use higher capacity chips. As a general rule, controllers that can handle more chips, larger chips, and faster chips tend to be more expensive. Mechanical hard drives have platters with magnetic dust on them. The platter is divided up into sectors, and the orientation of the magnetic field determines whether each sector is a one or a zero. Larger drives have more platters, generally. It is possible to artificially limit the capacity of a platter in order to make additional sizes. For both types of drives, size increases over time come from higher density. The flash chips in solid state drives improve every few years like CPUs (they are both silicon-based semiconductors). Mechanical hard drives advance more slowly. In either case, simply adding more storage media (chips or platters) is a significant engineering problem, so improvements in capacity are tied to improvements in the underlying tech.",
"The ones and zeroes used in binary coding are stored within a disk within the hard drive called a platter. Just as you can magnetize a nail this platter is divided into billions of sections each one able to be magnetized or unmagnetized to represent a 0 or 1. Depending on how many sections you can make that platter into and how many platters you can fit into a hard drive dictates the amount of memory you can fit in it. I was interested with this too so I decided to do some investigating and came up with this as he best explanation. URL_0",
"A drive with twice the capacity likely has more platters and may pack the bits tighter together. They do not cost the same to produce; just because their external case is the same size and shape doesn't mean they are the same thing.",
"There's a lot to consider about a hard disk, perpendicular/parallel magneto-resistive surface, glass/aluminum media, magnetic density of surface, how many disks/heads inside and so on. But if you are talking about same technology there's 2 options to double the hard disk capacity, double the number of disks inside or use only one side of them (in this case, halves the capacity). On both cases there's a small savings on the lower capacity versions, as the components are cheap compared to the final price of the hard disk. The big savings comes at quality control, if something doesn't work, there's a chance that part of it still works. Selling it at cheaper prices reduces the work and increases the profit comparing to recycling. source: I work at QC in a company that makes the disks for Samsung, Western Digital, HGST, Toshiba, Hitachi.",
"Speaking only of hard drives (not solid state drives): **More space to write** I want you to write a bunch of words, so I give you one sheet of paper and a big marker. If I want you to write twice as many words, I can simply give you a second sheet of paper. Hard drives store data on a spinning metal disc (called 'platters'). Once way to store more data is to just put more spinning discs in the hard drive. **Smaller marker** I have another sheet of paper, but I want you to write more words on it than you did the first time. So I replace your big marker with a really nice fine-tip pen. Now you can write your words smaller than before, so more words fit on the same sheet of paper. In this case, 'improving the marker' on the hard drive isn't so much a physical change as it is a software change. As time goes on, hard drive makers get better at packing more data into the same amount of space on a platter. ----- **TL,DR** Hard drive makers get better at writing data in smaller and smaller spaces over time. They can also add more writing space by adding more metal frisbees (platters). So in 2010, a drive might have used 1 platter to store 500Gb. Thus, a 500Gb drive from that time would have one platter, while a 1Tb drive from that time would have 2 platters. Fast forward a couple years, hard drive makers have better 'markers', and you can find a 1Tb hard drive with only a single platter.",
"All memory works on the basic principal of 1 and 0. Adding more 1's and 0's together can be interpreted as numbers and words. How these numbers are stored depends on the device, but the basic principal is the same. The place to start is with a CD. When you stick a CD into a tray, you'll see a small laser that reads by moving from the center to the edge and back. When it starts playing the disk spins. A raised edge is read as 0, a lowered edge as 1 (may be the other way around, don't remember). An HDD is the same, but it uses magnetic orientation instead. Positive is 1 and negative is 0 (again, maybe the other way). Now, the difference between a 500 GB drive and a 1 TB drive (and all others) is magnetic density. Just like a CD, only so much information can fit on a disk (called a platter in an HDD). Over time, new technologies allow for more information to be saved. This happens in one of two ways: add more disks (multiple CD's), or fit more data on a disk (CD vs Blu-ray). A 500 GB drive will have two 250 GB platters, a 1 TB drive will have 4. As far as cost, yes and no. The cost of the enclosure, stickers, platters, boards, etc. are all the same. When you mass produce this stuff, you want as many of the same components as possible to reduce overhead. But, since density of the drive is the first obstacle, you spend a a lot on R & D to up that value (part of the cost difference of newer drives). The second thing to do is add another platter or three (more platters, more expense). Drive technology constantly evolves in order to reduce latency, and increase both density and read/write speeds. If you can fit more onto a platter, you can get quicker speeds and lower latencies because the read head doesn't have to search between areas of the platter and/or different platters. More platters add to the overall size of the drive, but can affect performance of the drive. Solid state drives are the same, except instead of magnetics, they operate by transistors within a flash chip. More transistors are like denser platters, more chips are like more platters. While the basics of how data is stored and read, the different types of storage devices (HDD, SSD, CD, tape, etc.) each have their own benefits over the others.",
"Think of a hard drive as CD's stacked on top of each other with a read/write \"head\" floating above/below them. In drives that have more capacity, there are more CD's in the stack.",
"The answer is \"it depends.\" Let's say you're a HD manufacturer and decide to make 1 TB drives. Let's say during the testing phase, you find out 10% of your product is defective for 1 TB but could be sold as 500 GB. If you price them correctly, you could find a market for them instead of throwing them away. But let's say your yield of good units is almost 100%, but there is still a market for 500 GB drives and your warehouse is filling up with 1 TB drives. Then you could disable half the drive and sell them as 500 GB drives and clean out that expensive warehouse. In all these cases, the cost of manufacturing is the same. If however, you decide to make separate 1 TB and 500 GB drives, then the costs are separated by the amount of material used to produce them. Source: I used to work for some semiconductor and HD companies.",
"None of these explanations are for a five year old. Hard drives are made up of \"plates\" embedded with tiny magnets. A \"head\" moves over the plates and reads/writes to them as the plates spin. You can get more information by stacking more plates and heads into the container, but you're limited by physical size. A standard 3.5\" drive has increased in capacity through various techniques for making the embedded magnets smaller or closer together.",
"I've always wondered this but with CPUs and GPUs. The only difference to me is the price and performance, the size of the chips are the same. It feels as if they intentionally create worse chips then they can so they can tend to different price classes. If that's the case I think that it's a problem ethically since why not create the best product you can and loads of it if it takes the same amount of resources? Does anyone here know?",
"Just wanted to extend the good answers already here. So the basics: the modern hard drive is made of a platter (the spinning disc) that the data is stored on, and the disc read head. The data is stored as 1 or 0 by the orientation of the magnetic grains. You see, in magnetic materials, the magnetic field of each specific atom likes to arrange itself in parallel with its neighbour. This leads to grains of groups of atoms, grains, aligning one way or the other. Looks like a really small camouflage pattern. However, the data points of a hard drive are spread evenly across the platter with no regards to where the grains are. So each data point is about 30 grains but can be more. Now we have entered a state where continuous improvement of this tech is impossible due to the \"media trilemma\". Right now data densities are about 2.54 TB per square inch. The grains have got so small that they are limited now by the superparamagnetic limit. As I said before, the grains are collections of magnetic fields that are aligned. They behave as one big field, and will orientate themselves together. They flip their field together and are just great friends really. If you make this grain smaller, they flip their field easier, meaning your data point can flip to a 0 from a 1 randomly. That's data corruption. Hard drives are made in this day and age to have this occur only once every 10 years. So you can't make the grains smaller. A new technology, Bit Pattered Media (BPM) aims to actually make each bit as a physical structure, but this is very hard. You can't reduce the amount of grains within each bit without making the field of each data bit unreadable. You could make the platter out of a different substance that has more stable fields that won't flip, but then you need a stronger field to flip the bit when you are writing to the hard drive. Containing a stronger magnetic field is hard, so you get the same problem as above. Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) aims to use a laser in the form of a Near Field Transducer (I don't understand how they work) to heat each bit to allow a smaller magnetic field to write to each bit, but keeping the stability of the field of each bit. There is also antiferromagnetic coupling but that's too complex to add as a side note. All in all, you can't increase data density without negatively effecting data stability and writeability. That's why hard drive data density hasnt increased in the last 5 years and will never get bigger without some big changes. EDIT: My bad, should really say the hard drive platter's data density. And 10 years is a stretch."
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6g7jfh | how do apps keep data secure when transferring over public WiFi? | I'm going overseas shortly and was thinking about how my phone automatically uploads photos to Google cloud storage when on WiFi. Do the same *security* principles apply across all apps? (Banking, etc) How does this information stay safe on public networks? Edit: security principles. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In a word, encryption. _Any_ data transferred over HTTPS is secure from the device to the web page you're connected to. HTTPS packets are encrypted, meaning snoopers can't see the contents. All people trying to steal data over WiFi will see is the **domain** ( URL_0 ) and not the path (/bankingapp/login.php) or parameters (?app=android) or the body (stuff sent when you submit a login form). Additionally, a well designed login system never sends the password, only a _hash_ of it (can be used to check if the password is correct, but not what the password is). Since HTTPS is a pretty well-adopted protocol, it's easy to write your app and server using HTTPS and let Android/iOS handle the encryption part of it. If anything uses HTTP (no S) traffic, then it's not secure. All of Google's stuff will be HTTPS, as well as online banking. It does depend on the developer, but there's more and more pressure on to use only HTTPS, and companies that _really should be_ using it get a pretty hard time if someone discovers they're sending data in plain text."
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6g85qb | how are the fbi and nsa able to recover deleted information from hard drives | I guess I specifically mean magnetic hard drives but if you can explain both solid state and magnetic media, that would be even better. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In most cases, when you \"delete\" something from a hard drive, you don't actually remove the data. You simply mark the area that the data was in as \"empty\". The data is still there and can be read until it's overwritten. In some cases, even if a data area is reused, it's not *fully* reused. Most computing systems break up a hard drive into blocks - fixed size small data segments. Your file will take up many blocks, but it likely won't fill the last block full. The space between the end of the file and the end of the block is called \"slack space\", and survives until specifically rewritten. There are some technologies that attempt to recover even overwritten data, but those are much more complex."
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6g8ubo | Before phones were popularized, how were the police informed of a crime taking place? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Walking to the sherrif's office/police station and letting them know. Some areas also had police call boxes (Yes, like the Doctor Who thing) in high traffic areas like parks that would connect you with emergency services, in America at least you can still occasionally see call boxes around although I've seen more fire call boxes than police. For the most part though, fast police response wasn't a thing."
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6g98r9 | How do Keygen programmes work? | I'm sure lots of you have used a Keygen programme to crack software before but, as somebody who doesn't have any idea about coding, I've always wondered, how is it possible to generate a code that activates something like Photoshop or Ableton etc without paying? Do the programmes have specific rules for the codes that they are supposed to accept? And how do people find keys that cause the programmes to activate when that key has never been generated by the software's publisher? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The programs in question have a specific bit of code that checks the key. This check is performed by an algorithm (i.e. fancy math equation) that determines if the key is valid or not; it doesn't store all possible valid keys, just the equation that determines a valid from invalid key. If you get into the code of the program, you can find this algorithm and reverse engineer it - learn how the math equation determines a key is valid - and develop a generator that uses that knowledge to generate keys that will be found to be valid. For example, lets take a super simply algorithm that checks keys - it checks 5 digit numbers to ensure that they add up to 25; if it does, the key is valid, if it doesn't, it is not. Once you know this, you can make a keygen that spits out 5 digit numbers that add up to 25 and register as valid keys. In the real world, the math is much more complex, but the basic concept is the same."
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6g9zqq | How subscription music services(Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) work? How does my money make it to the artists or am I wrong in assuming that it does? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"These services have ads and people also can choose to pay a subscription. The artists make money but not much really. But that applies to CD sales, etc. too.",
"These music services are partly subscription-based. The artists make an account with Spotify/Apple Music, and because of ads and subscriptions, they are able to earn money from it. Mostly how youtube ad revenue works but for music."
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6gavdj | How are search engines like DuckDuckGo any more private than Google if your ISP tracks everything you visit anyways? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"With a proper encryption setup (ie html over SSL), the ISP doesn't see the contents of the traffic, only the source and destination.",
"When requesting a page web page using the HTTPS protocol (recognised by the green padlock in any modern web browser) the content of the page is encrypted before being transferred, at which point your ISP knows nothing more than the website you are requesting the page from. For example, when I opened this URL from reddit, which is served over HTTPS only (try visiting URL_2 and see what happens), the full URL was: URL_1 As this page is served over HTTPS, my ISP cannot see the exact data that is being requested due to the nature of encryption, but they can see that I am on URL_3 (basically they will not see the end of the URL). Now to apply this information to your question. The real privacy comes down to DuckDuckGo's policy (which can be viewed at URL_0 ). As you can see, they do not collect or share data about your searches. Google on the other hand do not have this policy. Without going in-depth into what you already know, Google as a company pretty much market any byte of data they could get about a user. Regardless of whether I search using Google or DuckDuck Go, my ISP will only ever see the website I am using, as both websites use HTTPS as standard. Your IP is not collecting and selling this data, Google is. Hope that helps. Edit: Spelling."
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6gcqg6 | Why are people so critical of game development jobs? | I constantly see people warning others about going into the game development industry. On Reddit and elsewhere, people say the game development industry has a tendency to burn employees out quickly. How exactly does this happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's several things here that make game dev a generally shitty job. 1) **Lots of small indie studios or solo developers releasing a lot of small games that don't make a lot of money.** So there's not much money to go around.....and so a lot of indie game devs end up eating ramen. A tiny handful strike it rich by releasing just the right game at just the right time, like that car soccer game that sells car hats, or the Stardew Valley dev. But you won't get lucky, you'll just get malnutrition. 2) **Bad practices.** A lot of the money in game development is more in the advertising and hype than actually producing a game. Several really commercially successful games were really bad games. It gives some game devs a bad wrap.* I'm looking at you, No Man's Sky.* Other games languish in half-developed hell for a decade or are abandoned altogether once the early access money runs out. So, OK, indie game deving is crap, I'll work for a studio! You say... 3) **Low pay.** They know you really want to develop games and are willing to accept lower pay because you are 'passionate'. They know this because everyone knows game development pays shit and has long hours. So you wouldn't have trained to be a studio game dev unless you'll put up with it, and if you don't there's a dozen 'passionate' kids who also want to work on Call of Duty XXIV. 4) **Long hours.** Games moreso than business software relies on hype, and hype has a big advertising budget that's very time-sensitive. They know to advertise the game for so many months, building to a crescendo of greasy 15 year old palms ready to buy it full price on release day. So you had better damn well make release day, or they'll lose lots of money. So if you don't want to be fired you'll fix/polish EVERYTHING YOU CAN for the last 3 months of development. See also: why so many games release with bugs, even from major studios. 5) **Separate skill set from indie game dev.** If you want to be a studio game dev you'll have to be trained by a university to be a studio game dev. Completely different skills are needed. No closet shut-ins, no visionaries, you had better work well in a team making your quota of 3d skins a day. Indie game devlopment isn't transferable - you won't be doing main quest programming, you don't get to pick the language used, the game engine is written by a separate company. You have your little part to play over and over so you better play it, and all those years you thought you were getting experience making pixil rogue-lites that sell 500 copies don't count. As to how it burns people out. It's really not that glamours. You spend hundreds of hours on a pixil rogue-lite and it sells 500 copies and you have to ask your dad for another loan...Or you drugde in to a 16 hour day polishing the textures for Rambo DLC #12. No hot E3 chicks are pounding at your door to get nekkid and you aren't making buckets of money. If you have regular human ambitions like marrying a girl, buying a house, starting a family, and having a dog, or even just doing a lot of drugs....you'd have been better off going into accounting. Chicks dig accountants' wallet sizes."
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6gdymv | What is SLA in datacenters? | What does this parameter speak of? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It stands for \"Service Level Ageeement\", and is essentially the agreement which outlines what exactly the service provider (in this case the data centre but they're not the only ones that have SLAs) is providing the client company. It covers things like what service theyre getting (is it hosting? How much? From when? At what cost? Is there an option to change any of the amounts?), what kind of support they get (tech support? By phone or email or will they send someone out or all of the above? Will they do support outside of business hours? How quickly are they expected to have a problem that's raised to them, ie 24 hour turnaround for major issues? 72 hours? Two weeks for other things? Who has the authority to classify something as a 'major' issue? Are they responsible for supporting or replacing any hardware or software the client uses in relation to this service, and so on... it encompasses what the service provider is responsible for, who they're responsible to, how they will provide these services, and who at the client company is authorised to get them to do stuff, and how, and when. So around the sysadmin or the talesfromtechsupport subs you may hear something like this (this is a made up story that just includes buts and pieces of examples. My commentaty is in [square brackets]): The client called up yelling about how they cant connect to our server and we have to fix it right now, only they've called our emergency line because it's 10pm and this doesnt sound like an emergency it's just this one user [in this example, the SLA would stipulate what is inside and outside business hours, and what kind of issue in terms of number of users impacted or overall business impacted would qualify it to go to the emergency line, and any issues that dont qualify are not contractually expected to be dealt with after hours]. Then they're yelling about how theyve been having this problem on and off for weeks but there's no ticket in the system about it [the SLA will stipulate how issues from client to service provider are to be raised, ticketing is ubiquitous because then theres a written electronic record of when an issue was lodged, who picked it up, and theyll update the notes as they go to indicate progress etc]. So i tell the user to lodge a ticket with as much detail as possible, and that according to our SLA we only become responsible for an issue once we are officially notified of it. Anyway 5 minutes later the ticket comes in and this is one user having access issues from one machine, so when they call back demanding someone come out there at 10.30, which isnt gonna happen, and for a case of this severitt our SLA is 72 hours [in this example, the SLA has an after hours service clause and an after hours technician clause but because of the cost of having service people and techs on call after hours, the severity of issue which actually warrants them being deployed will be explicitly detailed in the SLA, so they dont have to start dealing with it until business hours]. Anyway they call back later to say they had a walk around the office and it's the whole floor, about 70 people, so I raise the ticket to a severity 1 and call our after-hours tech number. Edit: I was trying to make this story generic for demonstratiom purposes but I think i may have accidentally paraphrased an actual story I read on either sysadmins or talesfromtechsupport. I'd link to credit but aside from a vague recollection I have no idea when or who by. Was not my intention to steal a story :-P I think in the actual story the end user turned out to be lying about other people being affected, because users :-P"
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6gfcif | Can you connect to the internet without going through an ISP? | Like could you, with sufficient funds and contacts in the networking world just connect directly to the rest of the web allowing for unlimited speeds and the only limitation to this being your hardware? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"With sufficient funds and contacts, sure. However, it would essentially lead to you running an ISP yourself with only one customer. It would not lead to unlimited speeds, because there is a limit to how fast a link other ISPs would be interested in giving you. Your network still needs to be linked to the other networks of the world, and the speeds you get are dependent on the speeds others allow you to connect to them at. I think you'd have to cash in on some serious favours with your contacts to get it through, though. There's practically no situation anywhere in the world where this would be preferrable to negotiating a deal as a customer with an existing ISP. You would have to lay down new cables anyway if you wanted to be your own ISP, and if you were going to do that, you could instead use that high-speed connection to connect to an ISP as a customer. You might not find readily available information about this on their web sites, but if the ISP deals with business customers, there's probably a way to do it if you contact them, and tell them you'll be paying for all the work necessary to hook you up.",
"Yes, there are internet exchange points, at which you could connect. But getting in there means you're absolutely huge in size. This is something done by ISPs, CDNs like Akamai or CloudFlare, services that produce enormous amounts of traffic like Netflix, or companies like Microsoft or Google. Also it's extremely unlikely you can get there as a single person. There are going to be contracts, service agreements and so on. They'll want you to have techs on call at any time of the day, just in case your stuff happens to break something at 3 AM. And it wouldn't help you all that much, really. Extremely high end hardware still has limits, and smaller companies are going to be limited by their connection. Your connection to Netflix is going to be amazing, but whenever you go to a page served by a 5 Mbps connection, you're going to get 5 Mbps. Such a connection is of great benefit if you want to serve millions of people, or crawl the entire web, but doesn't give you all that much if you want to browse the web like a normal person."
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6gfuiw | why linux and windows can be installed on any pc while android need custom version for each device | I know that Android has Linux kernel ,. Which can detect any driver , once I used hard drive that has Linux and put it in another pc, Linux detected all drivers, why Android have the feature to detect all drivers especially in after market versions like CyanogenMod, lineage os | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Linux kernels *can't* detect any device. It can only detect devices for which it has drivers installed. Linux for PCs is typically shipped with every driver under the sun, and so usually a single distro will work on any PC architecture you install it on. Linux for small embedded devices, such as phones, is usually stripped down to the bare essentials to save space and boot time. But this means that a different version of the kernel has to be built for each device. Also, as /u/defakto227 points out, PCs are usually made out of standard parts and follow a standard architecture. cell phones are highly customized and so a one-size-fits-all kernel would be impractical, and would probably not work anyway on next year's model phone. I'll give a quick example: One cell phone product I worked on had a charging circuit that consisted of a number of control pins and data pins. The hardware engineers connected those pins to GPIO pins on the cpu chip with regards to what made the most efficient routing of traces on the circuit board, but without regards to which GPIO pin actually did what. It turned out that some of the pins wound up connected to GPIO pins controlled by the CPU, and others were connected to GPIO controlled by the cellular modem. We had to create a communications protocol between CPU and modem just so the CPU could tell the modem what values to set into the GPIO pins it controlled. Try writing a \"generic\" version of Linux to handle *that* case.",
"Computers have a much more open system of parts and chips. Common chipsets are shared across multiple manufacturers so it's easy to create an open source driver that supports a lot of different hardware well. Cell phones are essentially closed and custom designed. They may share some parts but there's no push to take a wireless card from my S7 and use the same one in the S8. It's getting better over time but right now there is incentive for phone component manufacturers to create open source drivers for their hardware. Edited for spelling."
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6gguwz | How can Google Maps give you results so fast? | Let's say you're planning a route from A to B, which are like 500 km away from each others. There's potentially billions of possible routes you could take. Yet, they manage to give you the shortest/fastest route within a matter of seconds. How is this even possible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't give you the shortest/fastest route within seconds They give you *a* short route and *a* fast route within seconds. Google maps prefers highways where possible and tries to avoid having you get off at one exit, skip around through backroads for ten minutes, then get on three exits later just to avoid traffic, its too complicated for the system and for the driver It does a quick check of where you are, where you need to be, then starts running the simplest paths. There are an infinite number of paths to any destination so most pathfinding algorithms add filters to narrow the list, if you are heading away from your destination its probably not the best path so rule that out. Most long distance routes involve finding the fastest path from your desitination to a highway, finding a path from your location to a highway, then connecting the highways throuh various methods and see if there may be a quicker way to get you to the exit or on ramp you want Path finding rarely provides a perfect solution(global minimum) but does provide a good enough solution(local minimum). Its not worth looking through millions of terrible routes to find one route that is 0.5% faster, but way more complicated",
"Dijkstra's algorithm: URL_0 They certainly use lots of extra complexity layered on top of this idea to increase efficiency. But Dijkstra's alone gets the job done."
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6ghaxr | How can I go from browsing a webpage to instantly being taken to a website saying something like, "You've won a free iPhone!" without clicking any other links? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Scripts that trigger another page to open. Javascript can even track your mouse position, which can set off a function that opens a page when the mouse is hovering above an invisible element on the page you are browsing for example.",
"Code on the page can automatically load another site in your current window or a new one. You're experiencing abuse of a this feature but it's often a good thing, like being taken to a confirmation page after your credit card purchase has gone through."
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6ghkco | Why aren't their speeding cameras that automatically record and ticket speeding cars the way red light cameras do? Or if they exist why are they so much less common? | My premise might be wrong, I'm just going off of what I've seen while driving. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"12 states, DC, and the Virgin Islands have speed cameras just like the ones you describe. Meanwhile, 13 states have made them illegal. On the other hand, 24 states have red light cameras. URL_0 So it seems likely that you live in one of the 24 states that has red light cameras, but not one of the 12 states with speeding cameras. They're more common in big cities and the suburban areas of big cities.",
"There are many arguments against speed cameras; I'll try to remember as many as I can. Does the speed camera catch someone 1mph over the limit, in which case a lot of people would be ticketed for a simple mistake which a police officer would've let go. Do they give a 5mph leeway? In which case, the speed limit is effectively 5mph more than the sign (and drivers will learn this). If a driver gets caught on three cameras while speeding down the same road, do they get three tickets or is it a single charge? If you put signs up and warn people of speed cameras, they will stop speeding there and find other routes, while a police officer's speed trap can be relocated in moments. Drivers learn where a cop's favourite hangouts are but can't know for certain which one the officer is at now. If someone is driving their wife to the hospital because she's in labour, how does the driver explain that to the red light cameras. I know I haven't remembered them all but it does give you a glimpse into why speed cameras have been considered and (mostly) overlooked. EDIT: 20th century gender assumption.",
"UK, we have fixed location speed cameras that are supposed to only be located at accident \"blackspots\". Red light cameras only at some junctions, they are triggered if you go through more than 1 second after the change. In some places there are also average speed cameras, mostly on major routes. Computerised number plate recognition automatically checks the time for each car to go between two cameras some miles apart. If you get to the second one too soon, you must have been speeding for some of the distance, so you get a fine.",
"Traffic laws are established under the assumption that they won't be enforced 100%. Ergo the fines are pretty high but the odds of getting cited in the first place are low. Speed cameras exist but their installation is contingent on the local public approving them. For this to happen, the public must be convinced that safety is a critical issue where they propose to place them AND that it isn't a money grab by the government. Most drivers speed at times while not many run red lights. The public is more accepting of red light cameras but not speed cameras Bc speeding isn't as dangerous as running a red. Also, speed cameras will enforce without discretion so even morally justified speeding will be penalized."
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6gjmhx | how every lock and key in the world is made to be unique with no duplicates | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They aren't, there are lots of duplicates out there Schlage house locks are very common, their keys come with a 5 or 6 digit code on them. Best case that gives you a million key combos. Not nearly enough to make every lock unique, but plenty to make it unlikely a random person has the same key as you Security is designed to make access more difficult so people don't try, it is never perfect and always accepts certain weak points that are too expensive to fix"
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6gkifw | What enforces a "read only" attribute on a computer? | I never thought about this, can't a program just ignore the read only attribute? I'm asking this because i noticed that certain text editors have a "force write" option that bypasses the read only attribute and write to the file anyways. Similar question: What enforces floppy disks and SD cards set to read only? Can't the computer just ignore it and write anyways? I think with floppies the floppy controller enforces the "read only" part but what about SD cards? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The operating system. When a program wants to open a file, it does so by asking the operating system to open the file for reading and/or writing. If it tries to open the file for writing and the file is marked as read-only, the OS will tell the program \"no can do\". If the program opens the file for reading only and then tries to write to it, the OS will once again say it's not possible. Disabling the read-only setting is also a simple matter of asking the operating system, however it requires ownership privileges or administrator privileges for the current user.",
"The read only attribute is enforced by the OS. All work with files is typically done through system calls to OS kernel, which will refuse to open a read only file in write mode. The \"force write\" feature is accomplished by removing the read only flag on the file before writing to it. This is possible because it's typically user's own file, which means the user can change permissions on it. SD cards have a physical switch that is detected by the reader and it informs OS of the SD card being \"read-only\". Which is then enforced by the OS as with other files. This mechanism is enforced by OS, there is no physical barrier to writing to such a SD card. If you have admin privileges you can write to a \"read-only\" SD card, and any virus/ransomware/trojan worth a damn will write to it. The only way to prevent a compromised computer to write on your flash is to use an USB stick with an actual write protection switch. WARNING: The majority of USB sticks with \"write protection\" have the protection implemented in software like the SD card. You need something like URL_0"
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6gl5c4 | Why is it difficult to create a light source that accurately immitates natural/outside lighting? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While the Sun's color spectrum differs from artificial lights, this is not the reason this is difficult. Any light made for film making combined with the correct white balance takes care of this 100%. Incandescent bulbs cover the entire visible spectrum, only in different ratios than the sun. With the correct gel or white balance, these ratios can be brought back to natural levels. The issue here is **distance**. Light, like many other things, follows the **[inverse square law]( URL_0 )**, which means that the further a light source is, the less difference it makes if you move closer or further from it. In other words, sunlight hitting your house is the same intensity than sunlight hitting your neighbor's house. Or sunlight hitting your face will be the same intensity as light hitting your hand. With an artificial light, the two won't receive the same amount of light, as the closeness of the light source means the light decays much faster. We have come to associate one with natural, and the other with artificial light. Even without thinking, we can \"tell\" that light that decays over a short distance is artificial, while light that doesn't decay is natural. An artificial light source can never be as far away as the Sun for obvious reasons, so another issue is that its shadows will never appear parallel. The solution is to put your light source very far away, but then you need a light source that's very very strong to compensate. This makes this type of lighting expensive, heavy and time consuming to set up. Another issue is diffusion. The Sun is surrounded by the sky, from our point of view. The sky is a giant surface very very far away. This means the Sun is accompanied by a fill light of a huge surface that is equally very far away, which is even more difficult to match with artificial light. There is no way we can build a surface anywhere near as large as the sky, and as far away. To light a single face you may need two giant white sheets suspended with tripods and weights, and four 5 kilowatt lights to light it. Then you need to put all this as far as you can, and hope that enough light still hits your subject. If done right, you won't be able to tell it apart from natural light. Beyond a certain point, our minds won't know the difference.",
"The light coming from the sun is mostly due to thermal radiation, which is caused passively by hot materials. The hotter it is, the shorter the average wavelength of the light will be. The problem is that it is much hotter than a lightbulb filament could be, giving it a [spectrum which can't be matched by incadescent lights.]( URL_0 ) However, it is possible to mimic the spectrum of the sunlight using LEDs or fluorescent lamps. They do that by first producing light of short wavelength, using dyes to turn that a bunch of other wavelengths. the spectrum of the sunlight. Those lights just are not very common, as most people prefer spectrums similar to what incadescent bulbs emit.",
"Your average light bulb makes no attempt to match natural lighting, but they make bulbs with every possible ratio of wavelength for hydroponic gardening, you can even simulate which season you prefer, as Autumn light tends to be ruddier than Spring light and plants that bloom in Autumn do best with a similar light. Source : I may have grown some indoor hydroponic plants at some point.",
"In short, the sun is effectively a point light source combined with Rayleigh scattering which gives us a light source with not just infinite depth but with the subtle effect on shadows as a result of the diffuse atmospheric scattering of light. There is a company that produces a light source seeking to emulate this: URL_0",
"Natural light is very diffuse. The direct light of the sun is a big component of that, but so is the reflection/refraction of that light from our atmosphere. So reproducing 'various levels of light coming from everywhere' is hard to reproduce.",
"They can, cinematographers do it all the time. See a scene in a film with sunlight coming through the window? That's not sunlight.",
"It's not? Photographers and cinematographers do it all the time Edit: downvotes for a fact? Ok. Recreating sunlight/daylight is a basic concept of photography and cinematography. Sorry my answer wasnt the typical Reddit pseudo intellectual bullshit buts it's true.",
"It's not. Been on loads of film sets where the artificial lighting looks like the real deal."
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6gm0j8 | Why is it that money is so hard to fake, and shouldn't money-printing machines be easier to build today? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Every time printing technology advances, money printers develop a new security that is difficult if not impossible to reproduce. It's as simple as that. Old money is really easy to copy by today's standards because it was pretty much just ink on paper. Then they started using specialized in that can only be bought by certain purchasers and specialized paper that again is only purchasable by certain groups and then they started inverting things into the paper that required specialized machines to produced, that are not available to the average person. They take everything that's commercially available today and ask themselves \"what do I need to do to make this impossible on those machines\" and they do that. The government has the money to invest in these security measures that make it not profitable for a potential counterfeiters to duplicate perfectly or illegal to (in the case of inks and paper that are illegal to sell to anyone but a government mint).",
"They are, that's why money gets revamped very once in a while. [Notice how the US $20 bill has a lot more color and detail than it used to]( URL_0 ) South Korea had lots of counterfeiting problems due to their neighbors so they now have [crazy currency with tons of security features]( URL_1 ) While money printing machines are easier to build today, modern currency is harder to print. Its your standard arms race."
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6go2x2 | How do airlines determine flights? | What determines where the planes go at what time? Is there an algorithm? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, there are indeed algorithms where you can input all the trips people want to take, and what resources you have, and get a roughly \"optimal\" combination out. In practice, there is a *huge* amount of manual intervention that complicates things, for example: - We've advertised this specific flight for a long time and don't want to change it - That airport is out of landing times during the hour we wanted - We merged with another airline and now have two flights that are too similar - We'd rather not run this flight in the middle of the night, but we will need the plane there in the morning for another flight"
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6gony8 | Why was 144hz selected as a monitor standard? Wouldn't 120hz have been the logical next increment? What's special about 144hz that made it a standard refresh rate? | 60hz is pretty much the standard for PC monitors, The next step up in the resolution standard is 144hz. Which seems a bit odd, because 120hz seems like an obvious logical next standard. So why 144hz? The next standard above 144hz is 240hz. Which makes sense considering 240hz is 4x 60hz. So where does this oddball 144hz come from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"120Hz was common for quite a while, then monitor manufacturers started advertising 144Hz as being a bit better, then everyone followed suit. 165Hz is now gradually gaining traction too. 144 is divisible by 24, which makes films properly smooth, but not by 50 or 60, so you'll see slight judder with both NTSC and PAL region video. 120 is divisible by both 60 and 24, which is nice for video use, which is why you'll see it reasonably often on TVs, at least internally, being able to actually send it a 120Hz input is rare.",
"Perhaps for divisibility? A 144hz system can play at 72, 48, 36, 24, 18, 16, 12, 9, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1hz fluidly. A 120hz system can work at 60, 40, 30, 24, 20, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Nope."
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6gpsuo | How do shows and movies eliminate unwanted noise? | I was watching an episode of Better Call Saul (S1 Ep 3, about 18 minutes in) and you can clearly hear the wind in the background and see the trees shake violently. I feel, that if it were shot with a normal camera, you would hear a lot of the wind distortion. How do they minimize the noise of the wind so that you can hear them talking? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You've seen the long boom mics that Saul's crew uses? Those are real - they're intended to just capture the actors lines during filming. Any background noise is added later by foley artists or other sound crew using sounds that were captured separately, or come from a library of sound effects. Actors may also wear body mics for long shots, and may also come in during post-production to re-record any lines that weren't clear during filming."
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6gquph | Why does scrolling up and down a picture with a horizontal black and white striped shirt make my screen look fuzzy. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Your screen is effectively a grid of coloured squares (and so is the image actually, probably compounding the effect). Fine lines, particularly on clothing because of how much it moves, are very unlikely to match up with the pixel grid so it leads to a distortion called the Moire effect. So functionally, if you ever are to be on video, dont wear a shirt with fine lines or stripes on it."
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6grzdh | - why do trains care what you charge in their power sockets? Does it make a difference if i charge my laptop or my toothbrush? | I'm currently on a virgin train in the UK and they have a sign next to the power socket which reads "laptops and mobile phones only". | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Laptops and mobile phones draw relatively less power than something like a hair dryer or electric space heater. If several passengers used such devices it is likely circuits would be overloaded and breakers popped. Passengers are dumb so they restrict it to a few examples.",
"Because laptops and mobiles don't draw much current (typically 1.5-3Amps) Although it's a standard 13A socket, the electrical supply couldn't actually support everybody pulling 13A for hair straighteners or fast-charging battery banks.",
"Like others have explained already, it's a service they offer free of charge. But it's something that cost them money to offer; The train has been fitted with extra equipment that produces the current for the outlet. Equipment that is pretty expensive and quite heavy. If you are to offer charging to 20 or so phones on a carriage, you can get away with reasonably cheap equipment that ain't particular heavy. If you want to allow everyone to charge phones, bikes and their monowheels, you'll immediately need something costly, kinda huge, that weighs so much that you have to give its placement a lot of thought, and it probably needs active thermal control too. In comparison, a few hundred stickers are kinda cheap. And, you know, it's the phone revolution that made them fit the outlets in the first place. It's not totally unreasonable to request that passengers only use them as intended.",
"ultimately because it comes at their expense. whilst it's put there as a nice perk, honestly they'd prefer you didn't use it at all. the intent of them is that some business people would travel by another means if they cannot have access to either their phone or laptop, so allowing them to keep those devices running makes them more likely to use the train.",
"It doesn't matter, but quite simply this is meant for productivity devices, they don't want people using it to charge their ebike batteries or other high drain devices.",
"Because stupid people will do stupid, costly and dangerous things unless you specifically tell them what they can do in very simple terms. Also, if stupid people continue to do stupid things you can point them at the sign and if it ever goes to court you can say that the rules were clearly published. Virgin doesn't really care what you plug in as long as its safe, doesn't trip a circuit breaker and doesn't cost them lots of money. 99% of people are charging their laptops or phones, therefore they can make a simple sign. But what about all those confused people who aren't sure if they're allowed to charge their iPad? The answer is simple: who cares."
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6guttw | The relationship between USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 | I keep hearing them used interchangeably. Are they 2 names for the same thing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"they aren't the same. USB-C is both a *protocol* and a *connector type*. The difference? A protocol is the set of rules several different gadgets have agreed upon, so that they're able to talk to each other over the wire. The connector type? The physical shape of the lil' connector thingy. Thunderbolt 3 is another protocol, it works even faster than standard USB-C protocol and sports some extra features. It uses the USB-C connector. So with supported devices, they say to each other over USB, \"hey let's switch to the Thunderbolt rules\" and start chattering with each other that way, to do Thunderbolt specific tricks like monitors. Not all devices with USB-C connectors can do Thunderbolt. In fact, I think at this point only Apple devices and gadgets made specifically for them can."
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6gvydr | How can a software 'age'? | As in "software aging", not as in software getting dated. EDIT : "all software's tendency to fail, or cause a system failure after running continuously for a certain time"-Wikipedia is what I'm asking about. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So I had to google that article, and I still don't know why you didn't just link it, but ok. The article itself describes what they mean by it. Programs that run for a long time tend to fail at some point for simple reasons. The most important is, that any program that will run for some time and do something actual useful, is inherently complex. Those tend to be error prone, and those errors accumulate over time. Most programs can handle some errors coming in, but it becomes more and more likely with each error that one might slip due to unforeseen consequences. It could be a timing error. Imagine a clock going 1 second per day slow. You don't see that error for a day. Or even a week. Even a month will go by just fine. A year? Well that is 6 minutes, something that is actually visible. That sort of error can be anything in a program. A timing error which accumulates just like the clock example. A very minor memory leak that leaks a few kb per hour of RAM, ever increasing the amount of RAM required by the program, or something that adds or substracts a slightly wrong value in each iteration. The longer a program runs, the more those tiny mistakes build up, until the system fails."
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6gww06 | How does Stephen Hawking's speech device work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"URL_0 He uses a sensor that he can control with a muscle in his cheek to type on a computer. The cursor scrolls across the screen over the letters and he stops it when it gets to the right one, plus there is predictive text. Then a text to speech program plays it aloud. I have a friend who uses a Dynavox for the same purpose by clicking a button on her wheelchair's headrest with her head. It can take a while to have a conversation."
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6gx0ue | How is golf filmed for live tv when as soon as the ball is hit the camera follows the ball in the air perfectly | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There is a gadget, off camera behind the tee, called TopTracer. It's a radar ball tracking gizmo that measures the ball just after it is hit. This information on flight and spin is used with a model of how golf balls fly in the prevailing weather conditions, that is used to command a gimbaled, computer-directed camera. Just a lot of folks with money to spend on science and not enough work to do. It makes great TV, though.",
"They already know where the ball is going as stated previously, but they also aren't showing live shots. They are showing shots from a few minutes ago, so if they don't get a good angle on the ball, they will just show the person hitting and you won't see the shot of the ball.",
"Aside from the wonderful technology mentioned, life is made easier by the fact that we already know roughly where the ball is going."
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6gxld5 | Why are cell phone carriers allowed to advertise "unlimited" plans that aren't actually unlimited? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They lay it all out in the details, its fine. They literally tell you exactly what the plan is. It will be something like this: Our new Unlimited^1 data plan! Get it today ^1 Unlimited means up to 10 GBs of data at full speed, then speed may be reduced to 128 kbps. This is normal legal disclosures and such, and is totally fine. They tell it like it is. In fact they are being completely upfront with what they are offering, as long as you actually read the contract and details, which of course you are supposed to."
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6gy8j3 | Why do we have to restart our PC after uninstalling an app? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on the OS, most times, a restart is unnecessary, but in some cases it may be required. ###Windows: On windows, applications are stored as files and registry keys. Registry keys are never cleaned properly, and an unnecessary large amount(talking a hundred uninstalled apps) may slow down your PC a bit (not by much though, it's just that windows loads every registry key on startup, even empty ones). A restart is necessary if : - The app has a daemon running, as executables that are currently run on your machine cannot be deleted - the app has stored data in protected areas of your system (system32 for example) - The app installed shared DLLs that are currently run by the system ###Unix: Unix based operating systems use only files to store app data, and the executable files, restarts are only necessary if a daemon is running, even though linux kills pending processes to not interfere with the uninstall. ###And in general : It's always a good idea since it may free up some RAM, and don't forget to defragment your HDD afterwards.",
"In my experience, only the OS itself applies to this statement, meaning updates etc. Any other program I've used asked me to restart after installing/uninstalling and not once have I"
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6gyrum | Why do video game developers take so long to come out with their game when it seems as though they have a nearly complete product at events such as E3? In essence, what takes them so long to revise that they need months after releasing game play footage? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Are you talking about a video or a demo? It's easy to make the 'in-game' videos look great even with a half finished product, so long as the engine and a couple of major features are ready to run. In a video you won't be running into any bugs and you're not dealing with users who wind up trying things out that aren't fully implemented yet. You just show off exactly what's ready to be shown off and you make it look good. You don't even need any artificial intelligence, as you can simply script everything to play out in an exact way you want it to. A demo generally requires the game to be much farther into development, because here you'll be dealing with actual users intentionally or (usually) accidentally abusing your game and your system in every way possible. Depending on the demo, you probably want most of your base systems to be in place. For video games this could be a fairly fleshed out combat system, collision detection, artificial intelligence, decent optimization and so forth. But even when you have a demo, you might not have implemented most of the content into the game already. Adding new areas or levels to a game isn't as simple as just loading up a level editor and throwing new things down. You often need new scripts, new enemies and encounters to design and balance, play-testing, to debug 428390572409572490472098572094 lines of code for every single new line you actually write and so on. Some of the systems working in a demo's background might also be little more than quickly hacked together code, made solely for the purpose of bringing a demo out in time. So you might not realize just how much of a mess the system really is at that point. In closing, I must point out that marketing departments in the video game industry have absolutely no clue what an 'alpha' or a 'pre-alpha' is. -.-",
"I mean, No Man's Sky showed us a lot of things that the game didn't have. As well as the infamous Spore.",
"Pretty sure DEMOs and such are sectioned off parts of the game they get working just to show it off and hype people. Game itself is no where near complete."
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6gzj7y | How do wifi extenders/boosters work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A wifi extender works like a middleman. It is placed at a location where it is just in range of the main wifi router (say 10 meters). It connects to the main wifi router. It then itself creates another wifi network at this distant location of another 10 meters. So now a device which is 20 meters away from the main router can't connect to it, but it can connect to the extender, since that is only 10 meteres away. Your device sends signals to the extender. The extender than re-sends these signals to the main wifi router it is connected to. Ditto in the reverse direction. Thus, the extender becomes a middleman that allows a device that it out-of-range of the main wifi router to talk to it, usually with degraded performance and speed, but at least you get some connection.",
"Imagine that the wireless router is a guy with a source of information, yelling at the top of his lungs. Devices are like other guys that yell requests for information to him and then listen to what he says. However, if they're more than 500 feet apart, all the yelling becomes unintelligible and no information gets through. So you put another guy in the middle, the extender. This guy listens to other guys yell their requests, yells them to the main guy, listens to his information, then yells it to the guys who requested it. Of course, you can see the problem with this. The guy in the middle can't listen and yell at the same time, he has to do one and then the other. So it takes twice as long for the information to get through. A Wi-Fi extender has exactly the same problem, it can't communicate with the devices and the router at the same time, so it cuts your speed in half. And that's half of what it can get, not half of what the router can provide. For this reason, they should NEVER be used. What you should use instead are Access Points. These are similar to extenders, but their connection to the router is made with Ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi. Since they no longer need to use half of their Wi-Fi bandwidth to communicate with the router, they can use all of it to communicate with clients. In the above analogy, It's like giving the \"guy in the middle\" his own source of information. Also, I want to clear up a common misconception: Routers have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Wi-Fi. What a router does is direct traffic between different networks (routing), allow multiple devices to connect to the internet at once through a single public IP address (NAT), assign IP addresses to devices on the local network (DHCP), and prevent unwanted internet traffic from reaching the local network (firewall). A \"wireless router\" is actually three devices combined into one: Router, Switch, and Access Point. The router does all the stuff I just mentioned. The switch is what gives you four LAN ports on the back. The access point is what gives you Wi-Fi. So, when I say \"get an access point\" I DO NOT mean \"get a router\". A home network ALWAYS has exactly one router, because the duties of a router require a direct connection to the internet via a modem or ONT. What I mean is to get a device that's only an access point and does not include a router, as the router part of it will not be used and will cause problems if it's active."
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6h0bmu | Why are electronic language translators so bad at their jobs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's take a simple German sentence: * Knopf fest drücken. This has a particular grammatical structure: \"Knopf\" is a noun, \"fest\" is an adverb, and \"drücken\" is the infinitive form of a verb. This construction is used to give instructions: the equivalent construction in English is infinitive-noun-adverb, so we know what the correct word order needs to be. So we start with the verb, \"drücken\". If we look it up in a dictionary, we find the following possible translations: * to push * to press * to hug * to pinch * to tap That's just the most common translations -- there are more besides. But which one is correct will depend on the context. So let's move on to the noun, to see what thing or person is being acted on -- \"Knopf\". It could be: * button * knob * stud * switch None of those are things that can be hugged, so we can strike that from our list of possible verbs. Those are also things that aren't normally pinched. Note, though, that we are using our own real-world knowledge to help us here: computers don't have real-world knowledge; they only have data that we have programmed into them. The adverb \"fest\" has many, many translations: * definitely * hard * firmly * strongly * tightly * permanently * securely * solidly ...and so on. If you don't know any German at all, you're probably looking at three lists of words and trying to calculate the number of possible combinations, and which ones make sense and which don't (for example, \"Tap switch permanently\" is obviously meaningless), but computers don't have even that level of intuition. The best online translators have access to lots and lots of already translated texts -- called a \"corpus\" -- which they can search through and find possible matches. It's a complicated business, though. A human, though, knowing that he is translating a sign for a panic button for bank clerks, would immediately come up with the most likely translation, \"Push button firmly.\"",
"What's up? Am I asking about the what you're doing right now? Am I asking about how your day is? Am I responding to your inquiry about my availability?? Amsking out the ceiling or roof or the sky? Language is very ambiguous and dependant on situation, the participants and other external factors.",
"The sentence \"Go take a run.\" has some 1200 base meanings without any context. The word \"set\" has over 400 definitions. How the hell is a computer supposed to figure out exactly which one you mean when you input the words to be translated? On top of this, you've got grammar to consider. In English, we tend to put the subject first, then the verb, then the object. \"It is a running dog.\" In German, they do subject, then object, then verb. \"It is a dog running.\" Unless it has a subordinate clause. Tzozil is verb, then object, then subject. \"Running dog is.\" You can't really expect even the most modern computer translation to be able to handle this at any reasonable level of accuracy. Perhaps in a few decades."
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6h0bow | How do you encrypt something like a phonecall where there aren't physical characters you can change like in a text message? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the end it's all just data, 1s and 0s. Most encryption methods don't particularly need to know or care about what the data is. As far as it's concerned it's just a stream of numbers. So how does audio become a stream of numbers? Sound is a wave travelling through the air. Microphones detect these waves and turns them into electrical waves. These can be turned into digital data by sampling the amplitude of the wave at regular intervals. So each sample is a number describing the amplitude or \"height\" of the wave at a given time. This is usually then compressed. Unlike encryption, the compression used for audio is typically specialised for audio. Rather than preserving the data exactly as it is, it knows what data it can throw away while still sounding about right. There are lossless audio compression methods, but I don't think a cellphone call uses them. At that point it's just data, and you can use various encryption techniques just like you can with text or any other types of data.",
"Phone signals are digitally encoded, so you encrypt it just like any other digital data (such as a document, a text message, a video, etc)"
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6h2ybl | What is actually happening when a computer/smartphone is booting? Why isn't it usuable immediately upon turning it on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you interact with a computer, you're interacting with software that lives in \"memory\". However, for the vast majority of computing devices, memory can only retain the software while it receives power. There are other storage areas on computing devices that can retain software and data even while powered off. On most computers, that's a combination of BIOS (a special computer chip that contains the basic simple operating instructions) and the hard drive. On a smartphone, it's a special kind of memory that's considered \"non-volatile\" because it doesn't get erased when the power goes away. These storage places are much slower than normal memory. When a computer boots up, it copies or \"loads\" the software that it will use from whatever slower storage it uses into its fast storage, memory, so it can operate at the speed you expect.",
"When you first turn power one, usually the system runs a check of the hardware to make sure everything it needs to run is connected. This is usually pretty quick but may take some time on some systems. Assuming that everything is good to go, the operating system is then loaded into system memory which make take some time. Once the operating system is up, there may be a number of processes that are loaded and launched on startup. All of these add to your startup time. Trimming down on what is launched at startup or having faster storage retrieval will often speed up the process.",
"When you shut off a computer, everything (including the OS) is dumped from the RAM, so the computer essentially suffers a case of retrograde amnesia. It has to 'learn' how to start up all over again, which is why it's not instantly fully operational. To properly initialize, the computer does several things in succession: -- First, the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) firmware is activated and its integrity verified. This is the first thing any computer runs after it's powered on. If the BIOS is missing or damaged, nothing else will start. -- After the BIOS finishes its verification, it performs a further series of checks called a POST (Power-On Self Test). The POST involves initializing and testing the CPU, RAM, display adapter ('video card'), optical drives and storage media, memory addressing, and various other hardware components. -- After the POST finishes, the BIOS checks for a 'boot loader'; this very small program runs from ROM (Ready-Only Memory) and its sole purpose is to load the operating system's (OS's) essential functions into RAM so the BIOS can 'see' the operating system. At this point, the BIOS and boot loader have initialized all of the critical system components. The boot loader is no longer needed, so it goes dormant; the OS takes over and completes the start-up sequence itself, performing one final self-check to verify that it's able to start properly."
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6h2zw5 | is there any advantage of tv screen over PC monitor? | I mean other than price. Monitors have better input lag and display quality, i'm able to get 4k even if i don't have enough space for 42 inches. And will be updated as long as hdmi and display port Will be supported | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The two main concerns with using a TV vs a monitor with a PC are input lag, as you mentioned, and resolution. On the latter point, the resolution isn't the only factor, but the *size of the screen*. When talking about 4K, you're only talking about the number of *pixels* in the screen: every 4K display, regardless of physical size, is 3840 (or 4096) pixels wide and 2160 pixels tall. That applies to both a 27\" 4K monitor and a 42\" 4K TV: they have the same number of pixels. However, to get the same pixel count on the larger TV screen as with the monitor, you have to make the pixels *bigger*. This isn't a problem if the 42\" TV is sitting several feet away from you (on the wall while you're on the couch), but it can be a problem if you have it at a typical distance for a computer monitor (2-3 feet away on the desktop). The picture will look fuzzy when you're that close up, not the crisp 4K experience you might be expecting. Aside from that, you'd be hard-pressed to find a 4K TV under 40\". So, if you want to use a 4K TV as a computer monitor, expect to use a large room for the proper viewing angle. --- By contrast, computer monitors are designed to be used at a shorter distance, so it's easier to find a sub-30\" monitor with 4K resolution (though it will probably cost the same or more, compared to the 40\" TV)."
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6h3hup | What are exactly rootkits? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Rootkits are bundles of software that can inject themselves into the operating system of the computer. They are almost universally considered malware. Computer viruses can be detected by antivirus software because they run as a separate \"process\". Antivirus software look at all the processes running on a computer and watch for the processes to show behavior or \"signatures\", like fingerprints, that are known to indicate a virus. However, the operating system itself has a \"kernel process\" that manages everything else. Antivirus software knows what processes are running because the kernel tells it what's running. Rootkits are software that can modify the kernel of the operating system itself. Once a kernel is modified with a rootkit, it can hide a process from antivirus software, thereby allowing a virus to run on a computer while remaining completely hidden from antivirus software. The only way you can truly \"see\" that hidden virus would be to look at the computer from \"outside\" the operating system, which the antivirus software can't possibly do. In the computer industry we like to say, once your computer has been compromised by a rootkit, it's not your computer anymore."
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6h3v2d | Can anyone make a cell phone tower with a carriers frequency to boost signal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Technically yes, although it's fairly complex gear, you need the appropriate gear and you'd be in a pretty serious violation of whatever telecoms regulation exists in your country. Note that most telecoms won't have a way for you to legitimately connect to their network with your tower. In New Zealand Vodafone sells a box called [Sure Signal]( URL_0 ) that acts as a nano-tower, providing voice/text coverage over your internet connection. [This DefCon speaker]( URL_1 ) shows how you can create a fake cellphone tower and spoof a network. He uses low power antennas and a free-to-use frequency (that happens to be used on cellphones in other countries - frequency allocations vary between governments) so he can fly under the radar on violating telecoms law. From memory he uses some sought of spoofing to allow your device to be handed onto the real network via his network."
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6h5rdn | What is a cyber domain, apart from being just a location where websites can be made? | I just can't wrap my head around it and Google only offers cyber warfare scenarios. What does that mean, in detail? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The word domain is used for a number of unrelated concepts both within computer science and in other subjects also. A domain is always a portion of whatever you are taking about that works in a particular consistent way. When the links you saw in Google talk about the cyber domain, it is referring to the cyber domain of warfare or the cyber domain of crime. The meaning is, that portion of warfare or crime that is online and works consistently in accordance within the capabilities and limitations of online tech and takes advantage of this. An internet domain is (such as .com .org etc) is a portion of all internet servers. Originally the various top level domains (.com .org etc) actually were subject to different rules and so forth but not any more. I'm pretty sure that the term domain has flowed down to all internet subdomains as well. A Windows domain is a portion of Windows computers on a network that all consistently apply the same system policies as defined by the domain controller server. This makes the computers all behave consistently. There's probably other uses of the word domain in computer science also. These are likewise unrelated to other uses of domain except that they probably refer to a particular subset of something that works in a particular consistent way."
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6h60mp | Is "paperless document" more energy efficient than a paper one? | I have wondered this for quite a while. Hosting documents on servers, consuming energy all the time, and more each time you send/fetch data. But if you have something on paper, it is statically there. You can put it away and it will not consume anything anymore? So which way is it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, also it's not just electricity, think of the water, land. Electricity can be renewable as well, its over 80% renewable here in New Zealand",
"A server ( any pc is good if have a raid disk) can host an almost illimitate amount of documents. Also, the paper is not forever, if you need to edit the document you need to print it again for all the users. Also, you probably will need a shelf for all the paper you needand keep it at a suitable temperature for the users. Where i work the introduction of electronic storage have litterally emptyed 4 rooms from all the paper."
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6h6v28 | How was animation added to real life footage in films like Mary Poppins? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"divz0qs"
],
"text": [
"Frame by frame. They would draw and paint the animation on clear cells that they would then lay over the film footage. It was exceedingly slow and that's why some people still revere old animation-it was extremely laborious. This also created awkward interaction though. There is a short on why [\"Who Framed Roger Rabbit\"]( URL_0 ) broke the mold you might find interesting. In addition these original cels of animation are highly sought after as collectibles [sometimes fetching 6 figures for a single cel.]( URL_1 )."
],
"score": [
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"text_urls": [
[
"https://youtu.be/RWtt3Tmnij4",
"https://www.ha.com/heritage-auctions-press-releases-and-news/classic-disney-cels-lead-923-000-new-york-animation-event-at-heritage-auctions.s?releaseId=2328"
]
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6h7pez | How do they convert plastic bottles into shirts? | I recently saw some shirts that said they were made out of 5 recycled plastic bottles. The shirt is 95% polyester, and 5% spandex. How do they take a plastic bottle, chop it up and then make that into a fabric? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diw4crl"
],
"text": [
"They probably melt it, and then send it through a series of extruders to stretch it out into whatever size threads they need, which are then woven into the sheets of fabric needed to be cut and produced into the clothing.The process can be done with just about anything, there's even clothing made with silver or copper threading, the first at least used for its antibacterial properties."
],
"score": [
4
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"text_urls": [
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6h8c43 | What moves a helicopter forwards? | Sounds dumb, but I cant figure it out. Propeller A for height, rear one for right and left, but what moves them forward? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diwa4cl"
],
"text": [
"The tail rotor only controls the rotation of the helicopter (i.e. \"spinning in place\"). All other movement is determined by the main rotor. The main rotor blades aren't connected directly to the spinning shaft. They're attached to a plate. That plate has rods attached to it which control its tilt. When the helicopter is hovering, the blade are pulling the helicopter straight up (and are offset by gravity pulling it down). When you want to go forward, the plate the blades are attached to is tilted forward which turns straight up (from the rotor's perspective) into forward compared to the ground so the blade pull the helicopter forward. Same thing with backwards, left, and right."
],
"score": [
3
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6h8upp | How do mind-controlled prosthetics actually work? And how do they "feel" when worn? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diwhohq"
],
"text": [
"Mind controlled prosthetics work the same way your current limbs work - actuators respond to signals sent by the brain. Normally, your actuators are your muscles and tendons. Starting out, you have very, very poor motor control(babies), and as your grow your brain gets better at sending signals to your muscles and tendons to do increasingly complex tasks. Now replace muscles and tendons with servo-motors. Your brain is still sending out signals to the now missing limb; through a combination of electronics interpreting those signals and the brain re-training itself on what signals to send to achieve a given motion you gain the ability to move a prosthetic. The electronics may be taking measurements from muscle groups further up the affected limb, they may be reading brain waves, hell they may be taking readings from an implant in your brain. The better the electronics interpreting the existing signals are, the better you will be initially at using your replacement finger/hand/arm/foot/leg, but like everything you have ever learned to do practice is needed to improve function - just like babies learning to use their hands etc. as for how they feel when work - most of them don't offer any kind of feedback loop - if you aren't using some sense other than touch to realize your hand is squeezing a bottle too tightly, you don't know how tightly you are gripping. Some prosthetics do attempt to provide some kind of haptic feedback where prosthetic meets flesh to indicate resistance in a particular joint etc. There have been some interesting clinical results though, where people have had direct brain implants and have reported being able to feel through their new limb."
],
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6h929x | Why do most MMO's have reset on a Tuesday? | I can vouch for FFXIV and WoW. I think Overwatch is also Tuesdays. What is it about a Tuesday? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diwgjdc",
"diwg9hn",
"diwpfu7"
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"text": [
"Balance of staff availability and user traffic. Regular tech staff only work Mon-Fri. With network support center running nights and weekends. You never change anything on Friday, thats just rule #1. You need Monday to catch up on everything from the weekend. So that just leaves Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday. Tuesday is earlier in the week so you can see what flak appeared and have option to do hotfixes. You have less opporrtunity window if you do Wednesday and no window if you do Thursday.",
"WoW picked Tuesdays because it was a non-peak time of the week for game play back in vanilla. During that time it often took them 5 hours to do maintenance and 12 was not unheard of. Once that was established they simply kept it based on the play cycles they established in the game. Now most of the time they last 15 min-1 hour unless crazy things happen. Overwatch uses Tuesdays because it is a Blizzard game and that is the established maintenance time for the company because of WoW. FFXIV likely picked tuesdays because WoW has established that as maintenance time culturally for gamers, and because it is a non-peak time of the week for them (going back to the original reason WoW chose it).",
"Part of the reason in addition to the other comments, is that Microsoft Updates used to roll out on Tuesdays, and gamer's PCs were already down for any potential updates."
],
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6,
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6h9bon | How can a gaming headset reproduce 7.1 surround sound | I got got my first 7.1 capable headset and I'm blown away at the fact that I can actually tell the difference between someone in front of me vs. behind me in games. How? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diwk2f9"
],
"text": [
"The sound is coming from same set of speakers (technically called drivers). However the sound is postprocessed and distorted differently based on if it's from front or back. Your ear is pretty much same as every other person's ear, so it changes sound basically same as any other person, and thus it can be modeled how that distortion works and reproduce it"
],
"score": [
4
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6h9scy | How does the algorithm for music suggestions work? | On Spotify, the Discover Weekly playlist curated just for me based on the type of music I listen to is actually pretty good. How does a software figure out related music? Is it mostly just by genre or are other things like beats, tempo, etc considered somehow? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diwmeb7"
],
"text": [
"There isn't just one algorithm. Likely it is a variety of techniques including genera and artist; if you like Taylor Swift then they will probably suggest Taylor Swift songs and other pop artists. But another easy way is to ask you to pick a genera and then throw some songs of that kind that are rated highly overall. Then they ask you to rate them either positively or negatively. If you rate a song as being something you like then they reference their records of other people who liked that song and see what other songs those people also rated well. If 100 people liked the song you like *and* like a second song, it is a good bet that second song will be something you enjoy as well."
],
"score": [
4
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"text_urls": [
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6heklm | How does a router decide what inbound packets should be routed to which machine? | Well, let's assume Alice and Bob are both browsing the Internet on devices connected to the same router within the local network and they are both communication with the same external server. (I don't know if that matters, but the router can't distinguish traffic based on server's IP in this case.) How does the router know what inbound packets should be delivered to which machine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dixnzxi"
],
"text": [
"By port number. When the router rewrites the source IP address, it also assigns a random port number (and remembers it). When the packets come back, they're addressed to the the port the router assigned so the router can then look up which device on its network it used that port for."
],
"score": [
20
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6hfeqk | Why is individual key mapping always possible for keyboard while console games only let you pick different schemes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dixv1hm"
],
"text": [
"Individual key mapping is not always available, some games have fixed controls or schemes, it's just far less common. Many console games allow full customization, it's just far less common. It's simply a convention for PC games to offer more customization as there's more options available in terms of buttons and devices. Some people use different keyboard layouts. It might be a different scheme, like DVORAK, or it might be a different language entirely. Either way, stock mappings won't make much sense. It might even be a totally different device, like a 10-key gaming pad or console controller. It might just be preference, like a lefty preferring IJKL over WASD for movement keys. Console games, with their standardized input devices, simply need less flexibility. Only so many variations make sense, which is why you'll see 3-10 \"profiles\" as opposed to true customization."
],
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6hjb44 | What's the difference between a low end motherboard and a high end motherboard? | Other than ram capacity, size, memory slots, onboard wifi and audio, and other basic features, are there any big differences between them? Thanks for all the answers guys! If I've learned anything, you shouldn't cheap out on any part in your PC, because they are all important. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diyrds3",
"diytk60"
],
"text": [
"Better solder Better parts in general Better/stronger material Better heat/conductivity",
"The motherboard is a bit like a traffic system, with data being moved from the GPU, hard drives, memory, processors, ect. across your motherboard. A better motherboard will have a smarter traffic system in the form of chipset architecture, thus making everything else flow faster. It is a fairly critical speed bottleneck."
],
"score": [
3,
3
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6hk13v | How do games like Overwatch and Battlefield 1 (and others) allow you to play the games while still downloading? | I presume they install the core data and files first and then download the cosmetics and graphics related files towards the end, but how does my game handle the new files when it is already running? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diz3i5k"
],
"text": [
"You decide to order a boardgame online. You get your friends together every week to play. The package arrives, you find out that the the fancy game pieces are being shipped separately because they were heavy. However your friends are still there, you find that the box you just received contains the game rules, the game board and some passable cardboard game pieces. So you can still play with your friends. Over the next few days more fancy game pieces arrive, when they come, you swap out the cardboard pieces for the fancy pieces. That's how the download works. The biggest parts of a game are stuff like textures, sound files and videos. But you don't really need them to play, they just make it look nicer. The rules and the code for communicating online are relatively small. So they get sent first. Also BF1's single player was split up. Sort of like ordering all 6 seasons of a TV show, and Starting once season 1 arrives. You're watching season 1 while you wait for season 2 to arrive."
],
"score": [
6
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6hkhdf | Why have so many car models gotten so rounded looking? | As the title says, I've recently noticed how so many different car models that used to be boxy looking have gotten new body styles that are super round, like the Honda CR-V, Toyota Rav4, Honda Pilot, and some others I can't think of. Is there a reason for this other than people like the way it looks more, because I think they all look way worse then the old body styles. (Don't know if this is the right place for this sorry if not) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diz0zb9",
"diz5ro6"
],
"text": [
"Aerodynamics designed with the aid of computers. In the past cars were designed to look aerodynamic, and they hoped they actually were. Now adays they simulate airflow over the car body and actually find the aerodynamic shapes. However since physics is the overriding factor, many cars wind up looking similar.",
"Cars are also rated for Pedestrian Protection, which means avoiding sharp corners on the front among other things. [This page] ( URL_1 ) describes how it works in Europe, with the NCAP system. [Here's] ( URL_0 ) an article from Car & Driver from 2012 about the influence on car design. I don't know what the USA regulations are, or even whether you have any."
],
"score": [
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"http://www.caranddriver.com/features/taking-the-hit-how-pedestrian-protection-regs-make-cars-fatter-feature",
"http://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-explained/pedestrian-protection/"
]
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} | [
"url"
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6hlt1j | If crypto currency mining is so profitable, why aren't more people doing it? | I am trying to learn a lot about the crypto currencies out there and I would love to get more involved in it. I am hesitant though. I have always believed that if something sounds too good to be true, then most likely it is. This is where I get stuck with mining. Most coin miners seem to provide a a gauranteed pay off, usually within 3 months. From there on out you are in almost pure profit. Then there are the cloud mining companies, that without any of the hassles of running your own rig, they do it for you and you share in the profits. This is basically free money (albeit at a risk). Why are people not choosing this over keeping their money in a bank that gives them 1% profit instead of potential 10% ROI in one of these cloud miners? If this is the case, how come more people aren't doing this? Can someone please ELI5 what the risk / reward is here becuase I'm mostly getting my information from websites that are trying to sell me something. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diz95po"
],
"text": [
"It's not profitable at all. The time for that is largely passed. The only profitable mining operations are large scale where people can take advantage of economics of scale stuff. You wont make more in bitcoin than you pay in electricity with even a damn good home rig. And bitcoin is TREMENDOUSLY over inflated. Let's not forget it just lost a significant amount of its value. Now I'm not saying it's a BAD currency, but you are correct; too good to be true IS too good to be true. It's not a magic money making machine. Not anymore, at least."
],
"score": [
36
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6hlw2y | Why are telecom lobbyists currently so much more successful than tech lobbyists? | Most people seem to take it as given that the telecom companies are the ones who pushed through the FCCs changes to Net Neutrality - given that major tech players (with combined, and sometimes even individual, market caps far greater than the major telecom players) are dead set against this, how did the telecom companies manage to get it through in the first place? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dizd5b3"
],
"text": [
"Telecom is a regulated industry. Every company that is successful in that business is successful because they work within the rules and lobby to get the rules they want. They all have to work together because they are highly regulated. They have a common enemy, the consumer, and they have customer satisfaction ratings to prove it. Tech companies are much more competitive. They spend a lot of work beating each other in order to win the customer's money. Government has been hands-off in their business area so they haven't been involved in a lot of lobbying, which many of their founders consider \"cheating\"."
],
"score": [
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6hmn3m | What does the 'end task' command do differently than normally exiting out of a program? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"diziqge",
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"dizk6hx",
"dizhmt6",
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"text": [
"There are three main ways to stop a program. You can quit from inside the program. The program does whatever it's programmed to do when you click quit, saving data and closing files and such normally. You can use End Task (on windows), this is the operating system sending a signal to the program that tells the program \"Time to quit, finish what you're doing and then exit.\". The program (hopefully) responds to the signal, finishes up what it's doing, saves data and such, then quits. You can use End Process (also Windows). Windows just ends the program, and frees up any memory associated with it. There's no communication with the program. In terms of the other guy's restaurant metaphor: Quitting is finishing your meal then paying up and leaving, end task is being told to pack your shit and leave, and end process is being thrown out.",
"Imagine you are in a restaurant. And then you're asked to leave. You pick up your shit and leave. That's closing a program normally. Now when you end task. They bring in some bouncers and kick your ass out before you get to pick up any of your shit.",
"I've always heard it explained this way. Closing a program normally is akin to being in your car driving down the interstate @ 70MPH, taking the off ramp, braking slowly, coming to a complete stop, shutting the engine off and exiting the vehicle. Ending the task is like having someone throw a cinder block through the windshield while driving @ 70MPH.",
"Programs usually have various operations to do before they shutdown. If a program is frozen, it is unable to perform/finish these operations, and does not shutdown. 'End Task' closes it regardless.",
"One of the main parts of a desktop application is called the \"message loop.\" It is code that continually runs, checking for new messages from the operating system or other programs. Messages include things like user input (you clicked a mouse or pressed a key) as well as other notifications that an application is supposed to respond to. One of the messages that you can receive is the Quit message. This is how the operating system tells an application that it should shut down. The application should respond to this message by trying to exit in as graceful a manner as possible - for example, giving the user a chance to save any unsaved work. This is generally the same flow as normally exiting out of the application. Selecting \"End Task\" from the Task Manager in Windows sends a quit message to the application and then relies on the application shutting itself down. Because it's up to the application to handle this, there is a valid response which is \"No.\" For example, if you have an unsaved document the application might ask for confirmation if you want to quit and you could click no. So the OS does not actually enforce that the quit message results in the application terminating. However, if the application is in a bad state this message might not ever be received, or the application could still fail to shut itself down. In that case, the operating system can terminate the program by simply not running its code any more and unloading all of its code and data from memory, as well as cleaning up any shared resources it was using such as files or network ports. This means any saved work will be lost so it is the method of last resort. The OS will generally ask you if you want to terminate a process in this way if the message loop stops running for an extended period of time."
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6hmrgj | Varied times in automated response from bots | Especially bots on Reddit. Sometimes, a bot might reply to my comment within seconds of my posting, and sometimes it will reply days later. I understand that bots can be programmed to check for valid comments only at scheduled times or delay posting a reply to a valid comment for some amount of time. However, I don't think this is always the case. So what other reasons could there be? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dizgiiu"
],
"text": [
"- The server running the bot's scripts is down - If the bot is serving multiple people/reddits/discords/etc : too many people making requests - Some other tasks are scheduled and run before your request - If it's poorly coded, I guess"
],
"score": [
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6ho813 | Can radio stations track the number of people listening, and if so, how? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dizt1te"
],
"text": [
"There is no way for stations to know who is listening because the communication is completely one way. URL_0"
],
"score": [
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j168q/eli5_how_do_radio_stations_know_how_many_people/"
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6hoopj | why some videogames take a long time to install but other games can be put in and played instantly | For example the wii plays games without any installation but games on the Xbox and PlayStation take time to install | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dizxbnf"
],
"text": [
"If it has to install, that means it's putting at least some (but usually most, I think?) of the game files on the consoles hard drive and then running the game off that. The game doesn't need the disc to play after that but makes you insert it anyway as a form of simple DRM. If it doesn't install, it's running the game off the disc. Running off the hard drive is faster because computers can read hard drives way faster than they can read discs. This is even more important now that console games often get downloadable updates. Changing files on the drive is much easier and runs faster than loading up the unpatched files from the disc (which are read-only) and then changing them while the game running. This is also why fast drives (such as SSDs) give shorter load times; it takes less time to get all the information needed for the next part of the game."
],
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6hrz9g | How do graphics card manufacturers such as NVIDIA and AMD upgrade and make new and better cards? | This has been bothering me since I started PC gaming. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj0pr76"
],
"text": [
"The two main ways graphics card manufacturers make better cards are One: More transistors(Explanation of what a transistor is URL_0 ). If you think of the graphics card as a pipe through which water flows then finding ways to put more transistors on a card is basically figuring out how to widen the pipe so more water can flow through at once. This is generally done by either making the transistors smaller or by finding ways to efficiently supply power to more large transistors. The leap from the nvidia 900 series to the 1000 series is a good example of transistors getting smaller with the transistors in the 900 series being 28nanometers while the transistors in the 1000 series are 14 or 16 depending on the card. Two: Higher clock speed. This is the number of times the transistors in the card can switch on and off in a second. It's measures in hertz though you've probably only ever seen giga and mega hertz with a megahert being a million hertz and a gigahert being a billion. Think of this as increasing the speed of the water flowing through the pipe. The effects of clock speed changes within the same type of card with the same number of transistors can be seen by comparing two different versions of the same graphics card, say a stock 1080 vs an overclocked evga 1080, the two cards are using identical transistor dyes (same number of transistors in the same configuration) but the aftermarket evga card is capable of supplying more power and has better cooling both of which are required to push the clock speed higher and achieve better performance. There is a third aspect of all of this which is card architecture which has to do with how the transistors are arranged on the dye but it is much more complicated than the other two. Just think of it this way. It doesn't matter how much water is moving through that pipe or how quickly if it has to flow through ten pipes to reach its destination instead of one. newer architectures are generally better laid out and allow programmers to better utilize the available resources more efficiently. If you look at graphics cards overtime you will generally see an increase in both clock speed and transistor count leading to cards capable of more and more computational ability. edit One: FORGOT TO MENTION memory is also a factor. Memory is how much data the card can hold ready to be processed at once. More memory means more data faster memory means the data can be obtained well. . . faster. basically same as the other two new cards usually have more, faster memory. thank you /u/CT5Holy for mentioning memory and reminding me that it is a thing."
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6huxnv | What is cryptomining and how does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj1gbhj",
"dj1frrk",
"dj1n00w"
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"text": [
"I did it for a while. There's a lot to it, but here's how I can simplify it easiest: There's a complicated math problem that a lot of people are trying to solve. You run a program called a miner on your computer that repeatedly tries to find the answer to that problem. When it does find the answer, it gets shared between all the other people who were also trying to answer it, and when they confirm that it's the right answer, you're rewarded with whichever type of cryptocurrency you were mining (e.g. bitcoin). The answer also includes the next math problem everyone has to solve, so all the miners start working on that. Rinse, repeat. It's actually very simple to start mining on any computer, but you'd end up spending more money on electricity than you'd ever earn, so don't bother. I can go into more depth if you have specific questions but the actual cryptography is over my head. I have done a lot of reading about the various hashing algorithms used and how they work but I couldn't explain it well enough. It's been over 2 years. There are also a lot of cryptocurrencies with different methods, so I understand some better than others. Edit: For everyone informing me of the existence of altcoins, yes, I know, I only ever mined those (until multipools got big and then I took my payouts in bitcoin and let them decide what was worth mining). I meant it wasn't worth it to CPU mine them.",
"It means generating cryptocurrency. Think of a hundred dollar bill. Imagine if instead of a mint to put all the security in it, it was a really hard math problem, that takes trillions of operations to find the right answer, but that answer can easily be verified as correct in just a few steps. That is a cryptocurrency. Mining a cryptocurrency means using your computer to perform all those operations, eventually finding the answer, and then you can use that answer to buy stuff. As with all money, it is worth what people are willing to pay. It is backed only by its own scarcity and market forces.",
"This isn't mine, but it does a decent job for an ELI5 answer \"look, it's simple. you have a Happy Burger brand fast food establishment, and sometimes kids come in and want their Happy Burger brand Happy Kiddy Burger, which according to the Happy Burger brand franchise operating instructions is supposed to be 4oz of usda utility grade hamburger lightly grilled and pressed into a poppy seed bun with two slices of mild pickle and a slice of tomato and a piece of iceberg lettuce and the name of the kid written on the top in half an ounce of Happy Burger brand special sauce about which the less said the better so naturally what you do is, you post an ad saying, cooks wanted, please bring your own grill and meat and bun and pickle and tomato and lettuce, we'll supply the sauce and you get an applicant, and you send him down to the Hall of Cooks, which is a featureless infinite plane that you keep in the unlit basement of your Happy Burger brand fast food establishment. and you tell him to just keep making burgers and handing them up, and if he hands up a burger that satisfies your standards, you'll pay him a bonus, which is $100,000, plus the price of the burger, which is $.50 now the cook can't see too good down there, and he keeps handing up burgers that are more like pickly meatballs with a swastika painted on the side in tomato sauce, but as long as the meat's cooked the health department won't shut you down, so you keep taking them and dutifully handing down briefcases of cash with a few quarters tossed in. and the cook's pretty happy, even after you summarily declare one day that you're only going to pay $50,000 per burger in the future so the cook calls in a friend, and she sets up in the Hall of Cooks and starts handing up burgers, and now you're getting acceptable burgers faster than you can sell them. so you raise your standards a bit, and you insist that burgers have to be on a bun, and that cuts production back down to a manageable rate. but the cooks are still pretty happy, even after you cut the burger bonus again to $25,000 this goes on for a while, and now you're got a hundred cooks down there, and you're started demanding that they spell out the kid's name correctly, and that's not easy. so now they're not just making burgers to your increasingly exact specifications, they're racing each other to be the first to get the kid's name right. but you're still paying $5,000 a burger, and apparently the cooks are still happy, because more and more keep showing up you get curious one day while you're squeezing into your franchise past the giant mountain of rotting discarded hamburgers, and you head down to the Hall of Cooks. the last time you came down here, there were only six cooks, and they were just standing around in a disorganized circle; but now they're organized into these large groups. in one of them, you find your first cook, and he shakes your hand. \"remember when we just started out and i was lumping up store meat by hand and cooking it on that tiny old george foreman?\" he laughs. \"That was before we figured out cookie cutters and rolling pins.\" he's standing at a huge professional-grade charbroiler with twenty-four different patties arranged on it; suddenly, in a single efficient flash of movement, he flips them all over. of course, the dull glow of the grill isn't enough in the utter blackness of the Hall, and most of the patties end up on the ground, which you suddenly realize is a lot spongier than it's supposed to be. also, doesn't the ceiling seem lower? you shake it off and head back upstairs to start taking orders, wondering when it'll be the right time to cut the bonus to $1,000 it's been another year. there are tens of thousands of cooks in your basement. you're rejecting burgers for sloppy handwriting. you're rejecting burgers for having too thick a slice of tomato. you're rejecting burgers for excessively clustered poppy seeds. seven months ago, the cooks started building floor-to-ceiling ovens with internal robotics custom-designed for making Happy Kiddy Burgers; now there are whole fields of them, each making ten thousand burgers a second. of course, it's still pitch-dark down there, and the cooks aren't exactly susan calvin, so almost all of those burgers get added straight to the end of the Great Greasy Mountains, but it's amazing how quick they come now. you overhear a few of the cooks talking excitedly about the orders they just placed for massive new ovens from Barbecue Labs. you don't know how any of them can afford this when the burger bonus is only $100\""
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6hwz1e | Why does water-resistance change with time? | In [videos]( URL_0 ) that test the waterproof ability of a phone, a common test is to put the devices in a small tub of water and see how long they'll function. However, all this would seem to test is if there is a leak in the seal of the phone. I don't see how this could be a valid test without any depth or pressure change. Not that I think that they are all that concerned with validity, but I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the waterproof ability you are speaking of is dependent on the RATE of water entering the device. If it were a matter of testing which one got water in it first, you would be right because technically a hole is a hole. Two devices, one with a big leak and one with a tiny leak would both immediately have some water in them when submerged. However, for example, if the device requires 500ml to leak in before the water reaches sensitive spots, the one with the larger hole is going to allow water to enter at a much faster rate. example: Device A has a large leak while Device B has a tiny one. Lets say water enters device A ten times faster than it enters device B based on the size of the hole. In order to properly compare the two you have to keep all the variables constant aside from the one you are trying to determine. If you put device B at a different depth than A, you would be violating that requirement. In order for a proper comparison, the strength of the water pressure has to remain the same for both. If you lowered B to make pressure higher so the water would enter faster, all you are doing is making the rate of device A the constant and would be determining the pressure required to make B leak like it had A's hole. heh...."
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6hz54e | Why are analog wrist watches so complex with so many individual components? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A mechanical wrist watch is using lots of tiny precision components and have only been around for about a hundred years. However it is not very complex. There is a spring as a power source, a very precise pendulum to keep time, an escapement that make sure the spring is unwound at the rate determined by the pendulum and then there is a series of gears to create the movement of the different dials. So it is not so complex but it does require some precision components that needs to fit inside a very tiny space."
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