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6hzaej | Why videos don't load continuously, smooth way and load in small 'jumps' | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you're at a buffet selling only m & ms (in this case, bandwidth) with only one guy handing the candy out to people. some people will go up to the man with an empty bucket and ask for m & ms, instead of filling everyone's bucket to the top he will put in only a big handful, topping them up as they need. this is useful in many ways. Some people wont eat all the m & ms and what you've given them would go in the bin and be a waste of resources. Sometimes there will be many people at once asking for m & ms and it will be faster to partially fill everyone's bucket up rather than totally fill everyone one at a time. this way everyone can start eating and continue getting topped up when they're running low. This also frees up some of your own bandwidth and computer resources to use on other stuff while watching the video. i guess the analogy here would be carrying around a lighter bucket",
"They used to. You used to be able to buffer an entire YouTube video by just leaving it paused for a while. Most video sites have switched to [DASH]( URL_0 ) videos, which load in chunks as you see now. There are a couple of reasons for this. When you click on a video, there is a good chance you're not going to watch the entire video. When YouTube lets the full video keep loading, they are wasting bandwidth sending you data you will never use. So, loading in chunks can save them, and possibly you, money. The other benefit is that they can monitor your download rate and switch to a chunk from a lower quality (and thus smaller) copy when you hit the end of your current chunk. Similarly, they can switch to a higher quality copy if you have enough bandwidth. This allows you to keep watching the video without it pausing to buffer if your internet connection gets slow. The trade off is that you can't just select the highest quality and let it buffer the whole video. So, if you have a slow connection, it is harder to watch a video in higher quality.",
"Imagine a day at the office. You're juggling twenty things; scheduling meetings, talking on the phone, filling out tickets, talking with coworkers, etc. your computer (and the computer you are streaming the video from) are a lot like you (and a coworker) at the office. You talk when you can for as long as you can, but when it comes to it you need to go do your work and you can come back to that conversation when you are both free again. Now for your computer this conversation doesn't happen over the entire day (hopefully) or weeks it happens over seconds or minutes but it's still the same concept. You're computer is juggling a bunch of tasks and the server you're streaming from is simultaneously holdings (potentially) millions of conversations. Then there is how the conversation actually takes place...the conversation intentionally takes place is small parts (called file chunking) for a lot of reasons.",
"Assuming you mean streaming videos from the internet: They seem to download in chunks because each packet of data can take a totally separate pathway through the internet from the server to you. The internet is a complicated and busy place and the traffic patterns constantly shift. When the video seems to take an extra moment to load a section, this is because your computer is waiting for enough packets to arrive to assemble them back into the frames that make up the video. Because they arrive out of order, it takes a certain amount of time before the computer knows it has enough packets in the right order to make up enough frames to playback with the minimal number of pauses."
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6hzffp | What is a botnet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A botnet (or robot network as the name implies) is essentially a network of slave client computers all connected for the purpose of malicious use (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks, monitoring and stealing network traffic, etc.). One computer, the master, controls all of the other computers, the slaves, and gives them orders to accomplish a task. These tasks range from constantly sending requests to a server to bring it down, to computers attempting password cracks against various websites. This is all normally controlled from a secure line to each slave, and the master is typically a server set up specifically for this purpose."
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6hzsw9 | How do internet speed tests work? | When using an internet speed test, am I just downloading as much data from their servers as possible? Will this use a lot of data on my mobile plan? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sort of. In short, speed tests are conducted by simply retrieving a file from a server for calculating download speeds and then sending files back to the server for calculating upload speeds. Usually this is done in a short period of time (such as 2-10s), and big files are not necessarily needed to make this measurement. Modern speed tests are actually able to change dynamically the amount of data downloaded based on the initial results, so a faster internet would download more data so it can accurately calculate your speed. Think of it like this: let's suppose you have a 4 megabits per second download speed on your phone. When you touch \"start test\", your phone will try to download a 1 megabyte file. Since it 1 megabyte is equal to 8 megabits, it should take 2 seconds to download the file. Now if you were to have a 400 megabits per second connection, downloading a 1 megabyte file would take only 0.02 seconds... this is not enough time to make an average, so a bigger file would be needed in this case to accurately measure your speed. Speedtest has a great (and more technical) page about how they conduct their tests: URL_0",
"Yeah, it's basically a server trying to send data as fast as possible until a bottleneck is found and speed stabilizes. It can use quite a bit of data depending on the test. I know URL_0 uses a kind of tiered approach, where a connection that's clearly very fast gets to use a larger file for a more reliable reading. So if you're on GPRS or something, hopefully it won't use all that much data. On 4G/LTE it can easily use tens of megabytes, maybe 100 MB. Be careful with that; if you have a small plan like 250 MB or even 1 GB that's a noticeable chunk gone in seconds."
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6i03af | why is it with all the technology that we have today that most security footage or CCTV still looks grainy and takes time to ID whoever the perp or vehicle is? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Storing video in high quality formats takes lots of space and since security footage isn't that important minimizing cost is more important than quality picture. The footage is highly compressed which degrades quality, and often times the frame rate of security cameras is much less than normal video which means moving objects are more likely to be blurry.",
"Most cameras these days haven't exactly been replaced in recent years. The others however. The higher the quality the camera the shorter amount of time it lasts. Therefore its a trade off between replacing an expensive camera with good quality every year or replacing a not so great cheap camera every 5 years. As for IDying. Cameras aren't always at a perfect angle. Most detection software that is publicly available has to be at the perfect angle and lighting to work. CCTV cameras don't have this luxury so have to use more questions to answer what the number plate is.",
"True high definition cameras and equipment are expensive and most places never actually use the footage. To reduce both camera and storage costs many places only install cameras that record at 720p. 720p is fine if the person is 5 feet or so but if it's a wide angle shot if the whole front of the store it's not. Usually the images that get released are zoomed in and cropped from these wide angle shots.",
"$$$$ Security cameras are worthless until you need them so its hard to justify putting money into upgrading them because they have no pay back, good cameras don't even prevent an incident, they just make it easier to catch who did it, which may not even matter since insurance is paying out anyway So what's the best business decision? Get cameras just good enough to meet your insurance requirements and don't spend a dollar more on them because spending tens of thousands on high def security cameras is unlikely to save you tens of thousands in the long run"
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6i08vi | Why click bait webpages put everything in a slided format? | What benefit does the web page owner receive from putting their content in 50 different slides that you have to click through versus a scroll-able format? They have to understand it's annoying and at times almost unreadable. So what gives? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cause every time you click, the ads refresh, which makes them more money. Some ads also pay more to websites with greater engagement. So each click registers as more engagement. They don't care of it's annoying, they only care about money.",
"There are 50 different ads on those 50 slides. Ads pay the site per view, per page they are shown on. If they can get you to click 50 slides, they get paid 50 times. If you click once and scroll, they only get paid once. That's why it's called \"click bait\", they are paid per click."
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6i1bzx | why do you need Edge in Windows 10 to play Netflix in 1080P while 4K YouTube videos are supported by pretty much any browser on Windows 7? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not a question of capability as much as it is DRM. Edge is the only browser that supports the DRM scheme used by Netflix in order to offer higher-quality content. Other browsers cannot offer that same DRM protection, so content providers do not allow Netflix to stream content higher than 720p to those browsers. Most devices that can run a Netflix app will display 1080p and higher content, as will the dedicated Windows desktop app for Netflix."
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6i1waz | How do electronic thermometers work? | I understand thermometers with mercury in them that expand with the heat but how does a car thermometer work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually electric thermometers a resistance based. As temperature goes up the resistance decrease (or increases for some materials.). From there you either use an analog gauge to read current or voltage or you push the analog signal through an ADC to get a digital signal.",
"The thermometer has a metal probe which acts like the mercury. As it heats up or cools down the probes resistance to electricity increases or decreases. A computer then measures how much electricity is flowing through the probe then uses a algorithms to convert it to temperature."
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6i2ajp | In MMOs, what stops a game from having large scale battles? | The large scale battles in real life never consisted of a mere few thousand people but often hundreds of thousands to millions of people. ATTOTP (at the time of this post) there are 439,688 actively playing ff14. A game like this has enough players to have a large scale battle as seen in history. What in technology stops this from being possible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For starters everyone's pc would have to be capable of rendering that many characters in one spot, as well as register all the actions made by those characters. But I would imagine there would be a lot of stress on the servers having everyone in spot.",
"Rendering and communication of actions. [This is a good example of a massive number of players doing battle]( URL_0 ). A thing to note of this is that in real time it took 21 hours, in actual play time it was about 2 hours. TiDi is explained at the bottom of that link. The tldr, is that with the number of players connected in one spot, you over load what the servers can render, keeping track of everyones actions and effectively communicating that to every player takes a lot of power. What it comes down to is that no one actually runs that much hardware, and even more importantly, no one has the software to handle that much information in that way."
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6i2jv9 | How do developers of programs like firefox process crash reports? | X-Post from r/askscience. Couldn't grasp the concepts there at this early hour. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"See this [Pressention]( URL_0 ) A crash report is basically 4 things: * The exact build tag for the executable you're running, so that the programmer can match all the rest of the information up in their tools. * The specific type of crash (memory access, bad OS call, self-diagnostic triggered abort, etc.) * Which instruction the program crashed on. * A minimal set of content of the computer registers, and stack. This allows the developers to load up the exact same program you were running along side the exact source code used to build the program. The instruction pointer, stack, memory, and registers stored in the crash report let the developer effectively put the program in the exact state of the crash again. From there, it's a matter of working backwards to try to understand what happened. Sometimes it's as simple as putting in a missing validity check before using a value. Other times it becomes important to understand the steps the user took (thus crash reports with reproduction steps are really nice) in order to understand that it's a far-away piece of code corrupting this one's data. There's also tools that can collate reports together, and find patterns. Maybe it's on specific hardware, with other specific software running, in a specific country, or there's just multiple ways to trigger the same effect. This means if many people are submitting reports, the developers can effectively target the most common crashes while not wasting time understanding if two crash reports are the same bug or not."
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6i309o | How are TV commercials played with correct timing during live television events? | I was just wondering how commercials were played at the correct time during a sporting event, and how everything is coordinated, like the length of the commercials, and also how nothing in the live show gets cut off. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Producers/directors in the control room have everything timed out. They know exactly when to cut for commercials. It may be live but everything is planned ahead. Also, some live programs usually have a bit of a delay. I used to do graphics for a 24/7 news channel-type, and there were screens in the CR showing a timer, like for example 23 seconds to commercial, or 30 seconds to be back on air, etc."
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6i3mey | Why livestreams (Twitch, Youtube, etc) have such a clear and smooth quality while video calls (Skype, etc) are so laggy and low quality? | I watch a Youtube channel called Funhaus and they often stream using their webcam and the quality is perfect (also used for recording). They also play games with other Youtube channels and they use Skype to chat with them before and after matches, but the quality is incredibly bad. Why? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because you aren't watching them \"live\". There's a delay corresponding to the amount of time it takes to send the data to the streaming services, then to you. Once the streaming service has the data, they can stream it to you unhindered. The delay allows for perfect playback. Because a long delay wouldn't be acceptable with video chatting services, this method can't be used, and the data has to be streamed at a lower quality or with chunks missing to eliminate delays as much as possible.",
"While the technical answers are correct, there's also the matter of money. Youtube/Twitch make money on those videos, and that money is used to pay for the server to host them. For video calls, you don't have any ads or anything, so you get the free version. And that means either you get low bandwidth assigned to you by the server, or you get a p2p connection meaning no server at all, you're relying on your own internet for it."
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6i4uoc | Why did colour come to cinema before TV (For example, Dr. No was released in 1962 in colour but An Unearthly Child was in greyscale and released in 1963) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It all comes down to transmission. To move a old black and white movie, you put a can of black and white film in a box and drove it to a theater, you then shined a light through it and it showed up on screen. To move an old color movie, you put a can of color film in a box and drove it to a theater, you then shined a light through it and it showed up on screen. Everything since the film left the studio was exactly the same. The only difference was how you made the film. Color television on the other hand was different. The way you made the show was different, but the way of delivering it to the consumer and displaying it was different. Color TV contains more information, so you either needed a way to use more radio bandwidth or you needed tricks to reduce the bandwidth. Either way on the receiving end you would need to do something different with the signal than black and white.",
"Back when cinemas used film reels, the film in the reels producers would use could, and often would, be dyed to create coloured parts to the slides. TV didn't have the luxury of having film reels that could be coloured, and instead had to use the black and white cameras because the broadcasts couldn't be put on a film reel and delivered to every viewer's house, that'd be expensive. EDIT: three words"
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6i51y9 | Why do phone cameras record video in verticle format by default when held in their normal position when a horizontal image is the default when watching any video? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The camera sensor is rectangular. It does not rotate. So by holding the camera vertically you are also holding the sensor vertically. The camera *could* crop the video down to a lanscape orientation, but it will be at the cost of vastly reduced resolution (you're literally ignoring more than half the pixels on the sensor). Just hold the phone the right way around"
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6i61fr | How can aftermarket Android developers make custom ROMs and kernels that noticeably outperform a phone's stock software which was developed by teams of engineers who know the software inside and out? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Android is just Android. It's the same operating system. Custom OS releases like Cyanogenmod/LineageOS use the same proprietary drivers that the manufacturer Android OS releases do. That's where most of the \"optimiziation\" occurs. There are few differences at the end of the day. The big outliers are things like bloatware and custom software. If you load a device up with more software then it'll have to swap memory out on a regular basis, which is really really slow. Some manufacturers like Samsung also run their own custom UIs which are again often significantly slower than the stock Android UI. And lastly keep in mind that this is Google's OS. Google puts in by far the most work. Any deviation from what Google does will generally be slower as Google has some of the best developers in the industry. What custom Android OS releases do is mostly provide a stock Google experience.",
"Most of the custom small team stuff has significantly less compatibility or features than their big daddy's. Just like how you can make a car that goes faster than quite a lot of production cars by throwing a huge engine in almost any simple car frame/body, but thats because they are more luxurious, safer, handle better and have to comply to strict regulations. In the case of software, specially things like Android as well, you're talking about a huge amount of devices it needs to work with, Google can't just say \"tough shit, your device is bricked\", where as a custom developer can just say \"sorry, you're not supported\". Another example is how consoles frequently beat a PC ***with exactly identical specs*** because the developers are only developing, fine tuning and doing bug fixing on 1 single platform (per individual console) while developing for PC you have to make it work on the millions of different configurations out there, which is a difficult process that requires a significantly higher quality coding specification to ensure bugs don't get out of control, where as on a console everyone would have the same (within reason) bug, so you can just hard code an adjustment for it rather than fixing it which may well be harder.",
"lol @ people saying custom roms are making significant device-specific optimizations. The vast majority of apparent performance and battery life improvement comes from simply removing the carrier branded UI and replacing it with stock Android UI. Most of the remainder from removing crappy apps that wake the phone up in the background that you could not otherwise remove (at least without root).",
"Often, the professional, expert engineers don't have final say in the design of a product. Usually a corporate branding / marketing team will make the big decisions. Such people tend to care more about look and feel of the product, and ease of use, rather than squeezing out every last iota of performance. Modders, on the other hand, don't need or want all the hand-holding, and pretty animated nonsense, and so can take that out of the system, which results in better performance, at the cost of not always being something your gran can just pick up and use with ease.",
"Typically because custom ROMs remove an enormous amount of bloatware, which is slowing down your phone, hogging memory, and draining the battery. It's really that simple. The argument about developing for a specific phone is completely bunk, and frankly sounds like Samsung PR speak. Since the OS is customized by both the manufacturer and the carrier, it's super-fine-tuned: to sell you apps/services, not to perform well. That argument does hold water when you are talking about kernels however.",
"The team of engineers job isn't to make a super optimized ROM, it is to make a general purpose ROM that fits what marketing tells them to make, and to do it as quickly as possible- if they have any time left over to make performance optimizations, awesome, but it's not what they are focused on. The after market developers often are catering to a specific crowd that is interested in performance, and they are often doing it on their own schedule for fun (or because that's what *they* want in a phone ROM, and they are more than willing to share the benefits of their work with like minded individuals)",
"The teams of engineer are designing a product for mass appeal. 100% of the features are used, but 80% of the people only use 20% of the features (and they all use different ones). By removing features that certain groups don't care about, they can make things run faster/differently such that as long as you don't care about the things removed then the device is \"better\" for you. The tweaks to the ROMs may just be simple things like disabling services that most people don't need (but are important to have in a general purpose product). For example if you are never going to print, turning off the print subsystem on your PC will save some resources.",
"Like you're actually 5? Lets pretend samsung is just now getting into the kid's wagon market. Their galaxy w wagon has tons of cool features like air bags, custom steel wheels/rims, speakers, a cooler, two big comfy seats, and undercarriage storage boxes for you to store things. Except, samsung doesn't actually manufacture the wagons all themselves. What they do is buy the classic radio flyer wagon, and add all those things on. You convince your little brother to pull you around in your fancy new wagon. But with all the extra weight from the added features (some good, others completely useless), your little brother can only pull you around so fast. Then your best friend decides to just get a stock radio flyer, and bolt a folding lawn chair in it. When they get their little brother to pull them around (assuming both little brothers are equally strong), their little brother is going to be able to pull them around faster than your brother can pull you since they don't have all the extra weight. The radio flyer is stock android, the features of your samsung wagon are touchwiz/other manufacturer ROMs, your friend's folding chair is a 3rd party ROM, and the little brothers are the phone hardware. Your friend didn't optimize a samsung wagon better than samsung did, they just didn't add as much extra stuff to the \"base\" wagon that would ultimately end up slowing it down.",
"\"Which was developed by teams of engineers who know the software inside and out?\" This is a heavy assumption. I'm a software engineer and i'm working with software engineers around the world on my projects. You would be astounded how often the hand does not know what the foot is doing. Team A develops feature A and team B develops feature B but often no one looks at feature A and B together in a way to increase performance. Complicated systems like this have thousands of features and strict release schedules so often complex feature cross testing is not possible. Aftermarket developers have the advantage of millions of hours of user testing to identify and improve upon features that already exist.",
"Commercial products are typically developed and shipped with both a timeline, and budget, that can restrain development to what the leadership has defined as essential. Look/feel/usability/security/crash-proof. Feature content (like megapixels. It's a selling point) New devices often reuse as much software as possible, while spending time and effort on new features. The mod community has no restrictions. They can take more time, and share information, unlike any company in the world can. Mod software often appears months or years after the product was released. They can also sacrifice legacy features easily, when needed. If Apple took a risk with a new platform for the iPhone: a mistake might cost them billions of dollars. The mod community can take those risks easily.",
"This answer goes for all software development or other 'product-based' effort in a consumer society: priorities. You can ask the same question a lot of different ways. The fuck can tiny Harry's sell a better razor than giant Gillette for cheaper? The fuck can individual Minecraft modders write better-optimized Java than development house Mojang? Well, sometimes it's 'Wow Those Guys Are Really Good', but much more often it's 'Those Guys Have My Same Priorities, So I See Them As Really Good'. Your priority as a phone user is having a good user experience. The top priority of a ROM author is to gain notoriety by giving that to you. The top priority of a corporate dev, though, is whatever his boss tells him it is - today it's your user experience, tomorrow it's security or even CYA legal stuff, and Wednesday it'll be the reporting and data mining portions of the app, etc etc. It doesn't end there - that boss has investors and other bosses to please, who may understand the end user even less well. Meanwhile, that aftermarket dev isn't beholden to any of those interests, and can prioritize the same things you (the user) do. A difference like that can close even quite a large skill gap in terms of the perceived quality of the final product."
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6i6hjp | Why is reverse engineering sometimes impossible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's all about cost. This isn't a technology question, it's a cost question. Incremental costs to make more engines on an established manufacturing line is less than the cost to set a competing line.",
"Likely because the rockets in question are the precise size that we need, and it's cheaper to use theirs than build our own. Alternatively, we can't build enough of our own rockets to put stuff into space, so we use theirs. But this has nothing to do with your question; it's not that reverse engineering is impossible, it's that there's nothing to reverse engineer."
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6i6lf5 | How does time "fix" electronics? | Similar things have happened in the past but a week ago my son dropped a stuffed bunny he has that sings, claps its hands and waggles its ears when you press on its foot. He dropped it on the floor hard and instead of working it would just slightly vibrate until you flipped a hard off on switch. Tried resetting it a few times and it was still broken. This morning, a week later my son turned it on and it functioned fine again. It seems like sometimes, just giving it time will solve problems such as this, curious as to what could be a reason for that. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electronics are made possible by metal connections that allow electricity to flow through them. Over time or through repeated use, these metal connections can be corroded and/or lose contact. Normally this ends making the electronics unusable. However, with random luck, these contacts can reconnect due to some force knocking them back together or through temperature changes stretching or shrinking the components. This is why back in the days, you can sometimes \"fix\" electronics by bashing them a few times. However, nowadays, the circuits in advanced electronics like smart phones are small enough that this doesn't help. Nevertheless, more simple electronics like the stuffed bunny can sometimes reactivate this way. A similar thing happens with batteries. You may notice that removing and placing the same dead batteries in a device makes it power on even when previously it was dead. A small amount of corrosion forms between the contact of the battery and the electronics which will stop a bit of the energy. When you remove and place the battery back in, you may end up making a fresh contact, allowing the energy to flow again (though for a limited amount of time).",
"A few ways. One is that many problems are due to poor connections. A thin layer of oxidation or a microscopic crack can cause a bad connection which can be fixed by moving it around later. In this case time is not really fixing the problem, but it is wrongly seems to be a factor. Another way is that overheating can cause devices to fail. Time allows cooling. Then there are batteries which are too weak to work, but after resting for some time, they recover a little capacity."
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24,
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6i7b9p | What do AntiCheatSystems in games look for while allowing harmless mods (in singleplayer), but banning harmful hacking (in multiplayer)? | Bonus question: what is the difference between mods and hacks ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj456es"
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"text": [
"It can vary from one anti-cheat to another, but generally speaking they scan certain sections of memory for modifications, namely the `CODE` section and maybe parts of the `DATA` section. This is good for detecting hacks that write to memory to modify values or change game behavior, mods typically utilize some sort of API that won't set off the anti-cheat, many hackers circumvent this by only reading values from memory, doing some sort of rendering hook or creating an external overlay, and then drawing things on screen using the values they read from memory. In order to read from memory, most public hacks utilize the `ReadProcessMemory()` function from the Windows API. Because the Windows API is public and very well documented, it's easy for any competent anti-cheat to hook this function and block it's use, most private cheats have custom Reading/Writing functions to get around this. There's also Kernel-mode anti-cheats like BattleEye which restrict access to the process and won't let you open a handle to it ( you need a handle to use `ReadProcessMemory()` ). Hackers circumvent this by writing their own Kernel-mode drivers that can read/write memory and pass that info to a user-mode application. Source: I write game hacks for the lulz"
],
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5
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6i7dmm | How do barcodes never wind up being duplicated by different companies? | I have always wondered, with the absolutely stupid array of everything sold in different countries and the number of EAN and UPC barcodes in existence, how come companies never duplicate a barcode? Is there like, a central register of these things? Do you have to apply to a body to get one for your product? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj40v2p"
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"text": [
"The codes include a manufacturer code that's unique to each manufacturer. Because every manufacturer has a unique manufacturer code, the full code cannot ever overlap another manufacturer's product numbers."
],
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5
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6i8l7a | What and where are the "sensitive electronics" in an American passport and how do they work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj49wj1",
"dj4agsq"
],
"text": [
"Additionally, please list exact component SKUs and suppliers where they can be obtained, and a tutorial on proper assembly. Thanks!",
"There is an RFID chip embedded in the paper in the passport, it works similar to the credit cards that you can tap to the reader or office badges. A special reader sends out pulses of radio energy and the chip turns on and responds with a number encoded via a radio signal that the reader can read. This is basically your passport number (might be a different number though), and they can then look it up in their databases and compare the passport to your file. It helps a little bit with security, because it you swapped the picture out, the RFID chip would still cause the boarder guard to get the original picture."
],
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35,
18
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|
6i9qyh | How does Google's search algorithm work and what was the internet like before it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj4ju5l",
"dj4k8hf",
"dj4jx3w"
],
"text": [
"before google, all search engines indexed by the content of the page. they scrubbed the words on the page and ranked them by how many matches of the search string there are. it's very easy to uprank yourself. if your page is about video games, all you had to do was put a thousand repeats of the names of the hotten games out there. and you stuffed that into a non visible text area. voila! your page must be really important and all about video games. google changed things by not ranking how many words matched on your page, but how many other websites linked to you about the same topic. but really all that did was change how you created fake rankings. nowadays, there's entire industry of fake website makers, called microsites, that all they do is write mini blog pages and link to your website, making google think you're the hot shit cause you have 100000 websites linking to you.",
"Oh god, remember the early Internet when webpages used to list a ton of random words at the bottom to try to boost their search visibility?",
"Google uses something similar to markov chains to evaluate how good a link is in relation to the searched topic. It's quite a bit more complicated than that but it's hard to nail down exact criteria because they constantly tweak and refine their algorithm. Before Google you could wade through 20 pages of search results before getting one relevant link. God I feel old. I remember the stories of the young Google running off used hardware in a garage and how entrenched Yahoo and other search engines were. Edit Also Google returned search results several orders of magnitude faster with a simple page and no clutter."
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6i9vvs | What prevents microchip manufactures from using defective (but functional) CPUs | Lots of CPUs dont pass the tests, for different reasons. But i figure a good amount of them could still be used if they were underclocked or with the defective cores disabled. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj4l765",
"dj4paj1"
],
"text": [
"make a CPU's with 8 cores. did all 8 cores pass? great! that's a Intel i7-8000 series. oh shucks....2 of them broke? that's not so bad. that's Intel I7-6000 series. oh seriously? half the cores are busted? damn.. that's Intel i7-4000 series wtf? more than half of the cores are fucked? dood seriously? well let's sell them anyway as budget line i7-2000",
"> i figure a good amount of them could still be used if they were underclocked or with the defective cores disabled. This is literally what they do."
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9,
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6ib2ve | How come the US has been the only country to send deep space probes out (past Mars)? | Several countries have sent probes to the moon, Mars, and Venus, but only the US has sent probes into deep space. How come there was never a soviet/russian Voyager analogue or even a mission to Jupiter or Saturn? How come the ESA has never spent a probe to Uranus or Neptune? Just something that I was thinking about! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj4yxcx",
"dj4v0ne"
],
"text": [
"Imagine you land on a deserted island after a maritime accident with a group of people. One guy prioritises building a low powered beacon that is basically a needle in a hay stack. On the off-chance something comes of it then all of you will benefit from it. It wouldn't then be much of a point in another person building another beacon. Sure, there is some ego in showing \"I can do it too\", but honestly there are other and better things to prioritize. I suspect this is also a reason for the slow replacement of a US shuttle. The US can instead catch a ride with the Russians to the international space station and do whatever experiments up there.",
"Although no foreign nation has gotten anything into deep space *yet,* other countries have helped us in the past; NASA has this great article about US-Soviet cooperation during the Cold War years: > Despite the continued space competition between the United States and U.S.S.R., Khrushchev sent Kennedy a letter raising the possibility of space cooperation on a modest level after John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on Feb. 20, 1962. That led to two rounds of discussions between NASA’s Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden and Soviet academician Blagonravov. An agreement led to the opening of cooperation in three areas: 1) the exchange of weather data from satellites and the eventual coordinated launching of meteorological satellites; 2) a joint effort to map the geomagnetic field of Earth; and 3) cooperation in the experimental relay of communications. This link became a primary forum for subsequent U.S.-U.S.S.R. interaction on space."
],
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7,
3
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6ic8a0 | what happens when we click on dangerous pop up ads? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj56bwi"
],
"text": [
"Usually, nothing too bad happens. Browsers don't let scripting languages used to create websites (and ads) to access your files and such things. At least that's how it should be: Sometimes, the browsers themselves have vulnerabilities, which allow hackers to use Java Script to run harmful software on your PC. However, this is rather rare, as vulnerabilities are usually fixed very shortly after they come up. That is why it's so important to always update your browser. However, it's much more common for malicious ads to attempt to make you download and run a program on your computer. These programs are almost always malware of some type, and can do real damage in some cases. But until you open them on your PC, they are also just a harmless pile of data."
],
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6
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|
6iclk7 | Scientifically, what is the difference between color film and black/white film? What changed and allowed film to be in color? | What gives? I understand the basics of how film cameras work, but for the life of me I don't understand what changed. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj592u6",
"dj577zc",
"dj5iqet"
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"text": [
"Black and white film consists of a single layer of material that changes opacity based on the amplitude of light that flows through it, regardless of the color of that light. This produces a film 'negative'. The negative is then processed so that it doesn't change color anymore and is then used to expose another layer of film to produce a standard image that can be projected. In color film, the film may have three layers or three chemicals that change opacity to match hues of cyan, magenta, and yellow. This produces a color negative. When this negative is processed and exposed to another layer, you get the inverse of cyan (red), magenta (green), and yellow (blue), which can then be projected and matches the colors of the original photography subject. Negatives are usually preserved as much as possible, since they represent the highest quality version of the original image.",
"Well, there was color film that dated back much longer than you would expect. It has been around. The thing is, to represent color you need multiple chemicals that react in predictable (and identical) ways to expose a photograph. Black and white is easy, you just need something that reacts to light in a uniform way. And what changed is how amazing modern chemistry is. It's just...going from the 50's to the 70's they figured out a ton of shit in chemistry that made things possible. There are more details, but that's generally it. It's asking like why your AC unit today is better than an AC unit from the 50's (modern refrigerants!) or why we seem to have so many antibiotics when penicillin was good enough in the past (MMBB hey!).",
"Sensitizers. That's what changed. Photographic film is basically a kind of silver salt that breaks apart when it is exposed to light. But it only does that when it is exposed to blue-violet light. This is why reds and green appear dark in old black and white photographs. At some point , it was figured out some aniline dyes reacted to green light. So that adding aniline dyes to the film would allow you to take a picture of the greens. And then the same thing happened with red when it was found out the cholorohylls would do the same for red. Eventually these sensitizers were replaced by better chemicals. But since you could now take pictures of blues, greens, reds...you could compose them into color photographs."
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6ieeeb | Where is the money used in indie game development? | When you have an indie game developer, often they'll start a Kickstarter in order to get the funds necessary to create their game. What do they do with this money? What part of the process requires it if they're doing it themselves or with a small group? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj5j8xr"
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"text": [
"Like most humans, indie game developers need food and shelter. A significant part of the money will go towards the living costs of the developers. Apart from that they may need to buy specialist equipment (particularly if the game is for consoles) and software licenses. Maybe some teams will all work from home, but some will have office space they need to pay for. If so they also need to pay the bills for that, and any computer equipment they need, Internet connections, etc. They will probably need some kind of server running to support the development process. There may be Web based alternatives, but they will probably want a source control server which allows them to easily share their work between the team."
],
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3
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6ieq2n | How can my computer run Fallout NV, Portal 2, and TF2 on nearly max settings, while barely being able to handle Minecraft? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj5mdx5",
"dj5mve8",
"dj5njqc"
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"text": [
"Here are 2 reasons: 1. Minecraft is written in Java, which is slower than C++, the programming language used to implement most other 3-D computer games. Java is a popular programming language for all sorts of things, but it's not typically used for 3-D games. 2. Most 3-D games are heavily optimized to limit the number of objects on the screen at one time, to keep them responsive. They cleverly design levels and scenes in a way that look very realistic while keeping the complexity low enough to handle. In Minecraft, you can create arbitrarily complicated and detailed worlds with tens of thousands of blocks showing at one time, and lots of complex interactions between them and with creatures, etc. - since it's so open-ended, as the complexity increases it can tend to slow down",
"Minecraft uses your CPU more, whilst the other games utilise your GPU to produce fancier graphics. Your CPU is the limiting factor in minecraft, whereas your GPU will most likely be the limiting factor in these other games.",
"There is an issue where java doesn't use your dedicated video card. You need to check your java settings to make sure it's actually using the correct card. Sometimes it defaults to the on die video cards if some chipsets."
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6ifkfw | Why can't we provide internet by using the same technology that broadcasts television shows? | Video on television plays very smoothly in real time, while the same video may buffer when using Internet. That must mean that television have better and faster network. So why can't we use the same principles to make internet available at faster speed. Also TV network is much more spread out in the world, so if we already have the equipments, why can't we use them to make internet available to the whole wide world? This has been bugging me for three days, I would really appreciate an explanation... | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj5t9hv",
"dj5td7o",
"dj5tg5s"
],
"text": [
"The TV setup has two BIG perks the internet doesn't. * It's a one-way connection. * The messages are being broadcast to no one in particular with little concern about privacy. Your internet is bi-directional AND intended to be a connection that's potentially private for just you. This results in a **TON** of extra overhead in routing data, encrypting it on a per-user basis, etc. For wireless TV broadcasts, the antenna at the TV station has no ability to listen *at all*, and there's no system in place to distinguish unique users (like there is for cell phones).",
"When you watch tv, you aren't interacting with it, you are just accepting a signal. On the internet, you need to be able to sent info back into the system (clicking links, typing , etc). Broadcast tv just sends out info w/o receiving anything back, so the technology and infrastructure can be much simpler. That's why people used to just put an antenna on top of their house and watch Jeopardy.",
"> Video on television plays very smoothly in real time, while the same video may buffer when using Internet. That must mean that television have better and faster network Nope. TVs have a slower network but they're not on demand so there is no lag When you want to watch a YouTube video your computer asks for each chunk of it. When you watch cable your TV is just displaying stuff that's already coming down the pipe. Your cable box is receiving all TV channels at all times, it just selects which one it wants to show Pumping everyone the same data is easy, they already built an hours long buffer that they're pumping down the pipe. Sending different data to different people is harder because you may not have it on hand and are trying to construct a buffer barely ahead of what you're using with no chance to build it up in advance"
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6ii7uh | How come our regular water from the pipe isn't dirty? | Title says it. I have a hard time imagining water going such a long way to our taps without getting contaminated somehow. Thanks for your time! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj6gc28"
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"text": [
"If you're on city water it is more or less a closed loop from supply point to you. The local water supplier handles the cleaning and filtering. The main lines have a long way to travel generally and any sediment picked up will move and settle where it's lowest. The main line essentially always has water in it, so it's constantly washing away any potential build-up. Then when entering your home it may encounter yet another filter, depending on your setup. Cold water will be likely be directly from the main, hot will be from your boiler which drew water from the main. At your faucet, the nozzle likely also has a diffuser which not only prevents the water from splashing wildly in your sink, but also serves as a final filter for debris. Think of it like a garden hose, it may fill with dirt if left uncapped, but a quick use will blow out the debris. If it wasn't open to begin with it wouldn't have dirt to blow out. Should a line be compromised you can close/open valves to redirect or isolate the contaminated water for maintenance."
],
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3
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6iibyb | Why do text messages sometimes duplicate giving the impression to the receiver that the original message was sent twice? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj6lu8q"
],
"text": [
"This is not what actually happens in practice, I am sure, but it might be illustrative. Once the message is sent from your phone it goes to a Queue machine to be delivered. That Queue machine passes the jobs to one of a large group of machines to do the actual job of delivering the message. Those delivery machines will have their own queue of messages to deliver. Once the delivery machine has delivered your message, it tells the Queue that the job is complete, and the Queue drops the message from its 'To Deliver' list. If the delivery machine fails to report back, the Queue might assume the machine has crashed and will send the job to a different machine for delivery. If the failure is only in the reporting back, this will cause the message being delivered twice. If the delivery machine gets stuck in a loop or crashes, it might be fixed/rebooted many hours later, at which time it finishes delivering the messages it was given before it crashed. So the recipient gets the message again hours later."
],
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8
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|
6iio2f | Why do some DVD's still play in letterbox format if the TV is widescreen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj6ker5",
"dj6k5i7"
],
"text": [
"Movies are often filmed in 2.39:1 or 2.35:1. Which is a different ratio than your TV which is 16:9. As such it fits the full length of the video (which is longer than your TV is normally, so it puts black bars on the top and bottom to compensate. You're fitting a long picture into your TV, so it scales the picture down to fit your TV, the result, is unused space at the top and bottom.",
"Usually because the shape of the film is more widescreen than the shape of a widescreen TV so there needs to be padding on the top ad bottom of the picture to preserve the original film shape."
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|
6iioes | Why does ALL software need regular updates all the time? | I understand that newer computing power and better system specification would make things like Windows XP obsolete over time. But why can't we just upgrade some components of Windows XP to make use of better resource like 5TB RAM and 32core 64GHz CPU to have 3D holographic display and patch some security loophole when necessary to make it the "perfect" OS that can be used for 100 years? Why do we instead keeping coming out with Win2000, Win10 that made older system obsolete? My question came from the fact that until recently I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 and very happy with it, but was forced to change because the support needed in 2015. It comes to my mind that why can't we just make a perfect system that only requires minor safety and incremental updates (like for new hardware) only when necessary and leave the features untouched. Why do Ubuntu needs to have a team of developers working on it all the time to come out with new features and change the current functions? And then there exists things like Microsoft Notepad that virtually never changes AFAIK and stays relevant. Is that only due to its extreme simplicity? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj6sel3",
"dj6l8pm"
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"text": [
"There are plenty of software packages out there that don't need and rarely do get updates. The problem is that since today everything is internet connected, much of the software on those internet connected devices needs to be constantly patched to close newly discovered security holes. With an OS like Windows XP that does not receive any more official security updates this can lead to very bad things very quickly. Another thing that you have mentioned is the keeping up with new hardware. Usually this is just done through drivers and doesn't need and direct changes to the underlying OS and the software running on it. However sometimes the changes in the hardware are so fundamental that they require major changes to the very principles that the OS it based on. Your example was Windows XP with 5TB of RAM. (current Windows 10 Pro and higher only supports up to 2TB or system RAM if you want to use 5TB you need to install the latest server version of windows.) This was indeed a very big problem. the original windows XP was a 32-bit operating system and could only address up to 4GB of RAM. To give it the ability to handle more RAM the whole OS needed to be changed into a 64-Bit OS which required many many changes to the software involved. So they came up with windows XP 64-Bit which supported up to 128 GB. It took a few more versions before the 64-bit version of the OS was what became the standard. Minor changes in the hardware can be easily dealt with even by older software but big changes that affect underlying paradigms like the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit or the one from BIOS to UEFI or similar require more changes to the software. That being said, if you look at the latest version of an OS like Windows you will find that underneath the hood there will be some small programs and parts of programs that have barely changed at all in a decade or more. Notepad may look like it has barely changed, but it has undergone some changes. For example the way that the language support was separated into a mui file like with all other Microsoft programs. The simplicity of the program comes in part from the fact that much of what little it does is actually done by other parts of the OS like the file open dialogue which is part of the OS. There are also many superficial and unnecessary changes to the User Interface that are perhaps just done for marketing purposes rather than any real technical need. These superficial changes sort of cover up the fact that the Software underneath is much the same that it was before. The thinking is that customers are less likely to pay money for a new version unless they can actually see that it is newer and better somehow. Still there is a market for software that shouldn't or can't be updated frequently. Mainly embedded devices or places where safety and security are a big issue. These may keep for a few years or even a decade as long as nobody tries to connect them to the internet or tries to plug in newer hardware. An example that may come the closest to what you meant may be corporate systems like IBM's AS/400 which has been around for almost 30 years and received lots of new hardware and software versions since then, but which is fundamentally still the same it was in the late 80s and even today with all the support for new concepts can run legacy applications that were written decades ago and haven't had much in the way of changes since then. Of course the normal user interface is still a bunch of green text on a black screen for that system which helps to explain why in the consumer market so much emphasis is on changing how the graphics of a system looks to the user.",
"How would you setup ubuntu today to handle a quantum GPU on a PCI-e 5.0 link outputting to a holographic display? You can make software awesome and super expandable and make it last forever It will cost you 100x as much, take 200x as long, 30x bigger, and be 1/4 as fast as software designed to do what it needs for today. Feature creep is the biggest enemy of software development, planning for the future can lead to a project stalling and falling into development hell, support just what you need to today, maybe consider tomorrow, but build something you can ship Perfect is the enemy of good, and good enough is what lets us move forward quickly"
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6ik7w9 | How can we call or video-chat with someone across the world and sound like we're talking to them instantly? | Does this mean that radio waves are as fast as the speed of light? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj6wgxa",
"dj6wchl"
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"text": [
"There is a small (sometimes noticable) delay which we precieve as basically normal conversation. A huge contributor to minimizing this delay is fiber optic technology. It allows information to travel the speed of light while in transit across thousands of miles. Modern processing power and elegant refined networking technology helps ensure the routing bottlenecks are at a minimum. Also data compression algorithms (like Pied Pipers ;) become more efficient which means less information needs to move for every second of video chatting.",
"Yes radio waves travel at the speed of light. light and radio are basically the same thing: electromagnetic waves and they all travel at the speed of light. Telephone and video conferencing communication around the world usually have small but noticeable lag in them because the data that gets send does not travel at quite the speed of light, takes indirect routes and actually spends quite a bit of time inside devices being processed."
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6ikb5t | why do graphics cards, RAM and hard drives have such different prices per GB? | Obviously it's not the same type of memory, but why does a 4GB graphics card cost ~10x as much as a 1TB HDD? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dj6xthf"
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"text": [
"Read / Write speeds (usually) is what makes a difference in prices. The Rule of thumb here is Faster access speed - > Expensive parts. I will explain why difference memories need to have difference speeds. RAM and hard-drives work \"almost\" the same way, you store information there that you are going to use later. The only variables are \"time stored\" and \"access speed (speed that the CPU gets the information)\". There are also SSD, that work the same way as Hard-Drives but are way faster (and expensive as well). The major differences are that you can access RAM several times faster (from 50 to 600) but the information on the RAM is lost when you turn the power off. So RAM is good to hold information you are working (like videos that are playing, programs in execution, etc) and Hard-Drives are good to store information for long times ( albums you \"downloaded\", images, etc) Think of that like: Hard-Drives are for storing information \"for ever\". And RAM is to temporary store information for the Central Processor. Graphics Card work differently compared to Hard-Drives. The Graphics card contain the GPU and that's is a Processor very similar to the CPU, that's optimized to work with Matrices and Arrays, that are the basis of most images / 3D objects. As all processing units, it needs a bit of memory to help it out. That's where the 4GB / 2GB part comes in: It's basically the RAM for the Graphics Card / GPU. There are 2 types of GPUs: Integrated and dedicated. Integrated is often seen in small devices and it does not have \"RAM for GPU\", It steals from the RAM. However most Graphics card nowadays are Dedicated, meaning they have their own memory (most seen values are between 1 to 8GB). There are other factors in a GPU that can affect performance. Don't look just to the amount of memory it has. GPUs also have working speeds. But a general rule is that more memory = faster / better graphics"
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6io9qy | How do cell phones connect to cell towers that are far away? | It seems like the radio in your phone shouldn't be powerful enough to communicate over a very far distance. You need a big, powerful tower that broadcasts out, but the little handheld device has to go just as far. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's really not going all that far, especially if you're in a major city. From where I'm sitting at right now, there's 2 TMobile towers within 2 miles (one is about 1/4 mile away). There's about 25 towers that service the entire Las Vegas metropolitan area for T-Mobile. There's other towers for Sprint, ATT, Verizon, etc.",
"The tower has a very large transmitter that can send a powerful signal, but it also has a very large receiver that can receive and weak signal."
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6iqrrn | How do Life Support Machines work? | Always been curious. It's probably simple but would be nice to have an answer from real people instead of a search engine. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body is basically a bunch of machines that do stuff to keep you alive. Your lung breaths, your liver filters blood and so on. If those things fail you will have problems! Life support machines just do these functions. Say your liver breaks, you get a life support machine to do the blood filtering for you. Say you have a hard time breathing, then you get a machine to supply you with oxygen.",
"Most of the time when someone is \"on life-support\" it means they are on a ventilator. This is a machine that facilitates gas exchange by pumping in air either through a tube down the throat or a hole in the neck called a tracheostomy. It's a very high-tech piece of equipment that monitors crucial aspects of breathing. Another component of long-term life-support is feeding. This is done either through a tube up the nose into the stomach (or first section of small intestine) or through a hole in the side of the abdomen directly in the the stomach known as a PEG tub. Or if these are contraindicated, a person on life-support may be on TPN or total parenteral nutrition, which is is customized nutrients pumped directly into the person's venous system. If the kidneys don't work for some reason, they can hook the patient up to a dialysis machine that filters out waste, removes excess fluid and balances electrolytes. Of course this person will also need to be turned every 2 hours to prevent pressure ulcers, cleaned up after every bowel movement and episode of urinary incontinence as well. The other respondent is wrong when it comes to liver failure. There is no machine that does the job of the liver if yours fails. Heart, lungs and kidneys can all be supplemented by machines, but not the liver."
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6ir7e2 | How did people find cheat codes for video games back when they were a thing, did the developers release them or did people find out on they're own? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The developers leak them and they spread. They were commonly found in gaming magazines or cheat books if you remember those."
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6irj85 | How do WiFi signals work and how far can they reach? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As you can imagine with many technologies, they need to be standardised. A computer needs to know what data format another computer is expecting, what speed they need to communicate at, what other protocols it may be dependent on etc. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), a group that creates these standards, did this for WiFi and called it IEEE 802.11. From a physical point of view WiFi signals are nothing more than radio signals, which only defines a small subset of the electromagnetic spectrum. WiFi operates in different ranges (i.e. bands): 2.4-, 3.6-, 4.9-, 5-, and 5.9 GHz, but 2.4 and 5 GHz are really the most common ones. Each range is divided up in channels. For instance, the 2.4 GHz band consists of 13 channels: 2.412, 2.417, 2.422, ..., 2.467, 2.472 GHz. URL_0 As you can see from the image above, channels may overlap. When you have multiple devices that transmit WiFi signals, you need to verify that the channels they use don't overlap, in order to prevent signal interference. This is why devices usually only use the channels 2.41, 2.437, 2.462, denoted as channel 1, 6 and 11 respectively. You may want to put the device on auto detection mode so it can detect if a channel is already being used and choose one with the least interference. In practice, if you want to set up WiFi yourself you need a device called an access point. Sometimes (the functionality of) access points are embedded into a router, which you see happen a lot in home setups. When setting up the network, you specify an SSID which is the name for your WiFi network, a password and an encryption type, which should probably be WPA2. Other encryption types are WEP and WAP but have been proven to be too weak. The Wi-Fi signal range depends on a multitude of factors. Wikipedia specifies: frequency band, radio power output, antenna gain and antenna type as well as the modulation technique. 2.4 GHz has better range than 5 GHz for example, but 5 GHz offers more speed. 802.11 consists of different standards, e.g. 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n and 802.11ac. These types may differ in bandwidth, range and used frequencies. 802.11n and 802.11ac are the most commonly used ones. One last thing to note is that WiFi uses a technology called CSMA/CA. CSMA stands for Carrier Sense Multiple Access. There are two main types of CSMA: Collision Avoidance (CA) and Collision Detection (CD). They are two different ways of dealing with traffic collisions. A collision happens when two transmitters transmit at the same time. While Ethernet may use CSMA/CD, WiFi uses CSMA/CA. With CMSA/CD it stops transmitting for a while when it detects a collision, while CSMA/CA tries to avoid collisions altogether. So CSMA CA reduces the possibility of a collision while CSMA CD only minimizes the recovery time. I could expand on this, but this should suffice for an ELI5 :)"
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6irk2p | Why do ISPs charge more money for more data usage? If the cable is in place, does the amount of data moving through it really make a difference? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Simple supply+demand. Think of water pipe that can deliver so many gallons of water per hour. If you have 100 people getting water from the pipe each person will only get a small amount. Now add another 1000 people getting water from that pipe... the only way to be equitable (and make gobs of money) is to charge people for their water usage. The hogs will be pay the most. And in most places the internet \"pipe\" provider that brings it to your house pretty much has a monopoly on what goes into that pipe so you gotta pay what they demand.",
"There are some really dumb answers here, if you think for one second that company's like comcast don't do market analysis and install equipment ahead of demand your are not using your brain. They charge for more data because they can, the infrastructure in most cases is already there and they have financially planned for maintenance and replacement costs long before they are required."
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6is72e | Why do headphones get tangled in your pocket even if you don't touch it too much? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cords get tangled because there is only one possible configuration of a cord that will not result in it tangling: being absolutely, perfectly straight. Any other configuration and it will tangle. a tiny bend ro wrinkle will get bigger with every minor motion. Not quickly, but it happens. This makes more similar imperfect areas, which also move at the slightest motion. When you have them in your pocket or something, youve already created hundreds of these tiny imperfections, all of which compound endlessly. This actually happens even without physical actions. its why christmas lights are always tangled, even though its been a year since you touched them. It just happens a lot faster when you touch it."
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6it6s7 | why was is normal to have automatic transmissions with less gears than a manual one before but now you get ones with more than double a manual one? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Automatics have traditionally operated using planetary gearsets. Due to the way they function this allowed 3 forward gears, neutral and reverse. That was pretty normal until approximately 1980. Next generation Automatics added an overdrive. This allowed 4 forward gears. This has been the standard in most cars until relatively recently. Modern automatics have multiple sets of very well made planetary gearsets, as the number of gearsets increase, the number of gears the automatic can use exponentially increases as each added planetary gearset multiplies the ratios of the existing gearsets. This is why an automatic now has 7, 8 or 9 gears to choose from."
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6ium98 | How are we able to detect earth sized planets many light-years away, as well as potential composition, but aren't able to definitively confirm the existence of a much larger 9th, and 10th Planet in our own Solar System | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You're standing in a pitch black field at midnight. No moon, nothing. Your only light source is the screen of your mobile phone. 150 feet away is a guy in all black clothing. 1000 feet in the other direction is a giant fire with a guy dancing around it. It's farther away but you can see that guy because of the fire. (The void in the fire when he passes between you and the fire) You don't see the 150 foot one because your light source is not strong enough for his distance",
"Planets orbiting distant stars pass between us and the star, causing it's light to dim. It also changes the color of the light in measurable ways, and we use spectronomy to determine the chemical composition of it's atmosphere, if it has one, or it's surface, if it doesn't. A 9th and 10th planet orbiting our sun isn't going to pass between us and the sun any time soon, so we're relying on the planet to reflect light back toward us. That's a pretty long round trip, where the intensity of the light falls with the cube of the distance there, most of it gets absorbed, and then again the remainder reflected falls with the cube of the distance back. So it's extremely dim, and extremely small, and we have to be looking at *where it is* in order to detect it, and since we don't know that last bit, all we can do is sweep the night sky along it's projected path and hope to spot *something*. And if you focus the telescope wrong, you won't see it at all, even if you're pointed right at it.",
"Exo-planets are detected in two ways. One is by the star 'wobble'. Imagine swinging your 4 year old nephew by the arms, they move a lot but you don't. If you did this with your 14 year old nephew you would move much more. Swinging a 4 year old fast enough can cause the same size wobble as the 14 year old but more frequently. Second is the light from the star that is blocked by the planet moving in front of the star. Currently this only works for quite large planets. The sun is moving relative to us and being affected by many other planets. The proposed extra planets are so far away and moving relatively slowly so that the effect on the sun from our point of view is minimal. Also, the 'year' for these planets will be much longer than that of earth, probably 100's of years, and in the same way that you cant see the stars during the day because the sunlight is too bright, the starlight from distant stars drowns out the light from a non-luminous object that is much closer. We have never seen an exo-planet, we only see their effect on their stars. We would need a couple of full orbits of our extra solar system planets to make any reliable measurements, this will potentially take a few lifetimes.",
"While it does not address the first part of your question, Mark Rober (if you saw the car horn video on the front page last week, this is the same channel) posted a video a while back explaining just how difficult locating the 9th planet in our solar system is/was, and explains it all very effectively with some visual aids. You may find it helpful. [Link for those who are interested.]( URL_0 )",
"effectively, we use light from stars(or lack there of) to determine if there is an exoplanet, PRE EXPLANATION 1/2 this is determined by the planet crossing in front of its star(between us and the star) so it blocks the light and we can see the brightness of the star fade and the shape of the star warps a little, we can determine the rough size(usually jupiter/saturn sized). 2/2 we use the 'wobble' of the star to determine if a planet is having a gravitational pull on the star and its rough weight/size. think of it as you holding a sledgehammer and spinning around, you need to lean back to stay upright, so when you spin your torso isn't actually staying still, its going on a much smaller orbit than the head of the hammer, but moving none the less, so we can see this while observing a star. ACTUAL ANSWER so now we know the 2 methods commonly used to discover exoplanets, i can now explain why none of these work on planets at the edge of our solar system. 1/2 we cant use the light method, as these planets will never pass between the star(sun) and us, its orbit is just larger. 2/2 we are much to close to our own star to see the 'wobble' and we'd already know its being affected by multiple planets, so we couldn't really tell definitively if there was an extra planet. ANALOGY knowing we can't use those methods, think about simply trying to \"look\" for it, imagine i am in all dark clothing in the middle of an unlit road, there's 1 street light, your standing 15 feet from it, in the other direction from it, i'm standing 150 feet from it, would you be able to see me? if there's no other light source apart from that street light behind you."
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6ivo3l | the difference between interpreted and compiled computer languages? | I'm teaching myself code right now and this subject has come up here and there. I feel like I understand general qualities of the two languages but don't have a fundamental understanding of what they truly are. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Compiled languages are translated directly into the machine code that the processor can execute. It would be like taking a cookbook written in Greek, and getting it translated to a cookbook written in English. Once you have the translated cookbook, you can then follow the recipes (as can everyone else that reads English). Interpreted languages are translated on the fly. It would be like having a professional Greek interpreter sitting next to you, and you'd go \"ok, what next?\" and the Greek guy would be \"Add half a cup of broth\" and so on. The upside is that you didn't have to wait for him to translate the whole damn book, and if the original author makes changes to the book in Greek, you don't have to go retranslate it. The downside is that now whoever wants to use the recipe book has to have the Greek guy sitting next to them. Compiled languages are usually faster to run, but they require a \"build\" step which can be time consuming, and is effectively when the translation to machine code is done. Interpreted languages don't usually require a 'build' step, but they usually don't run quite as fast, because they need to have the interpreter there, translating everything as the program runs."
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6ix17w | How did people years ago bake cakes? | I mean I have a modern oven which allows me to precisely set the temperature. Some kinds of cake don't mind being baked a few degrees colder or hotter, but others seem to be very sensitive and the temperature needs to be precise. How did people years ago bake cakes if they couldn't even precisely measure the temperature, let alone set it to a fixed value? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's true that in centuries past oven temperature could not be measured as accurately, but each baker would know their own oven through experience. Bake 1000 pies in one oven and you would be able to judge it pretty well despite any slight differences",
"Your conventional range oven is nowhere nearly as precise and accurate as you think. Within 50-100degrees is pretty good. Maybe your high end convection oven is better.",
"There are recipes from medieval times that say to cook for the length of saying so many lords prayers or so many contritions. A cook can certainly time something using that method.",
"Repetition. To give you a modern day example, I have a grill on my deck. I know that a steak takes about 3 minutes on each side with one burner on high and one burner on medium. I never look at the gauge or even the clock : put steaks on, lay the table, flip, tidy up, remove steaks, pour drinks and call family and hey presto the steaks are ready and it's dinnertime."
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6ixjaj | Why are there so many spam links, specifically to sex sites? Do they actually work? Who is the ultimate benefactor? | I run a website and get hundreds of spam comments that get caught in our filter. Most of it sound like completely random websites and I have a feeling they don't get many clicks. If this is a profitable way to advertise, what exactly are they selling? What's the end game? Where does the profit come from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It costs virtually nothing to send an email. A small fraction of a cent. If one in a million people clicks the link they make money. Especially because... Most of these 'sex sites' are just pirate porn sites with malware. They don't want to sell you porn (though they may take your credit card number), they want to infect your computer and take it over. Often to make it part of a botnet or steal your money or extort you. So they need one in a million people to click on \"HOT NAKED CHICKENS!\" so they can steal their credit card number and charge 200$ on it. Some other scams do other things, like the 'Nigerian prince' scams. These people don't *WANT* you to contact them if you aren't a complete idiot because then you are wasting their time (because if you aren't a moron or in elderly decline you won't go through with wiring them the money...)",
"Sending spam is easy, you just need a program. Sex sites because that way you hook desperate/horny people. Yes, they work, or they wouldn't exist anymore. There are many people who are very gullible or not tech savvy and you only need 1 in a million people to click and it's profitable. The ultimate benefactor is the guy who is sending out the spam. And the end game is never to actually sell you porn or give you access to a dating site, they just infect your computer with spyware or another virus and take your credit card information so they can keep charging you."
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6izkj7 | What is the difference between machine learning and deep learning? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Simple version: deep learning is one kind of machine learning. More complex: Machine learning describes any algorithm that contains an often-large set of \"learning parameters\" which are \"trained\" on a set of data with known properties, and then used to make predictions about new data points via some arbitrary algorithm. that's kind of an abstract explanation and i can go into more detail if you want. Deep learning describes a very specific kind of machine learning based on neural networks, which are a mathematical approximation of the biological neural networks that make up our brains and wider nervous systems: essentialy based around the idea of neurons as discrete nodes in a network which can send and receive signals from their neighbors, and moderate their sending/receiving behavior based on those signals (resulting in all kinds of complex dynamic fun). Specifically, deep learning refers to neural networks that have additional, \"hidden\" layers of neuron interaction between the two \"visible\" input and output layers of the system, which communicate directly with the data and and prediction, respectively. The more layers you add in between, the \"deeper\" the learning gets, and the potential complexity of its behavior grows (generally speaking). this is not always a good thing, and some problems don't need an entire simulated rat brain to solve."
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6j0dfa | Why do some websites require credit card CVC and some do not at checkout? | Seems if someone could charge without it, why is it needed some places? What's more, why is it needed a'tall? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fraud prevention. Asking for the CVC is a much stronger proof that the purchaser actually has the card in question. The three digits of the CVC you are talking about are not stored electronically on the card so it can't be skimmed. Far from a bullet proof security measure, but does add security for remote transactions such as online and avoids situations such as telephone operators asking for your PIN, which is the security measure for the card being present at the transaction."
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6j22pw | Movies and film from past decades still look fairly decent. Why do live sports from the same eras look so bad? Even highlights from just 10 years ago look greatly inferior to nowadays. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The type of recording media being used. Film looked (and still looks) awesome, but it's really expensive and time consuming to work with. It also takes extra steps to take something shot on film and broadcast it on TV. So for sports, it just wasn't an option. Recording to magnetic tape systems was much less expensive, and the signal that comes out of that kind of camera can pretty much go straight to broadcast, making live TV possible. But they didn't look as good, and duplicating a tape (which often had to happen for archival purposes) or amplifying the analog signal (necessary if you're broadcasting a national game to local affiliates) hurts the quality even further. Modern broadcast systems are digital, and the reason for that is that digital format things do not degrade in quality when duplicated. Ten years ago the switchover process was still happening, analog TV was still a thing until 2009."
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6j33vy | Why has there been a surge in robocalls recently? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I read something a while back that mentioned the internet as a big reason for the influx in robocalls. Basically, it's easier to produce fake numbers and send out a massive number of calls using a computer, compared to the onerous process of dialing one number at a time on a phone. Of course, the internet isn't exactly new anymore, so I guess that wouldn't explain you only noticing this influx very recently. Have you recently put your number out there in ways that you wouldn't necessarily intuit as opening you up to sales calls (applying for apartments, using a job search website, etc)? At this point I pretty much assume that anytime I put my info out there, someone unintended is going to end up with it regardless of assertions to the contrary. And I don't think the do not call registry will help, really. It's kind of a big joke, because scammers and spammers don't really care if they're violating the do not call registry when their purpose for calling you is an illegal scam in the first place. The registry only really stops reputable businesses from making cold calls.",
"> Robocalls weren't this common even just last year, so what happened? They've been very popular for a few years now. You will notice a spike however, if your phone number gets added to a database (for example, you sign up for something and the company sells your data). The fact that it *just* happened for you this recently is anecdotal coincidence. It's been getting more popular, but the \"surge\" you got is because someone (or multiple someones) got a hold of your number More generally, the reason they've been spiking is because of VOIP- voice over internet protocol. Calls over VOIP make them both extremely hard to trace, and also makes it extremely easy to spoof a local number. They're also essentially free In the past, robocalls had to be careful. If you called the FTC and complained and gave them the number, they could track that down fairly easily. With VOIP, you have no info (And odds are they aren't even in the country) which makes it relatively hard to stop. There are apps that can help block/reduce the number of calls, I'd recommend one assuming you don't want to change your number. Sometimes the apps will flag a normal number, so YMMV. Changing your number will work until they stumble upon it (again, likely because it was in a company's database that got sold). edit: Also 3 words of caution: Some scams try to get you to say certain phrases like \"yes\" so they can record you and use it. Try to avoid prompts like that. If someone is calling claiming to be a company, always hang up, look up the number, and call them back. It is possible to spoof real numbers, including hospitals/police etc, not just generic \"local\" numbers. And last, never ever ever ever give your information(Social security, credit card, etc) over the phone unless you're absolutely sure it's safe. edit2: Forgot to mention: If you get a call and it's just silent before hanging up, they may just be testing to see if the number is in use. That's another way they get your number.",
"The latest surge seems to be a result of the recent ease of Caller ID Spoofing and software used by companies for automated calling that is more readily accessible. Caller ID Spoofing is when you call someone and make it look like your number is actually someone else's number. Looking at the example in the news today the Miami man was able to generate 90 million calls in 3 months which comes out to about 700 calls per minute. You only need a few of these guys to harass a lot of people.",
"The technology behind making these calls is getting cheaper and easier to use. Additionally, we live in an Information Age where data can be transmitted faster than ever before. Try something real quick: Google your phone number. See what happens. You'd be surprised to see what might come back. And now it's easier for people to create automated systems to massively send out calls.",
"- The technology got cheaper. - The change in administration means that the regulations are probably not being enforced. - The president fired _lots_ of the FTC, DOJ, and FCC and the other regulatory and enforcement bodies, so there's literally nobody to investigate and prosecute the offenders. - With no replacements even suggested to fill the roles, the probability of getting someone through the congressional vetting process and hired into the jobs before the statue of limitations on the current offenses runs out is \"Extremely Low\". So welcome to deregulation. (Start Rant) Keep in mind that I am teh olde, I was alive for the passage of the clean air and water acts, I remember the burning rivers and brown skies. I was also alive before the robocall technology was invented. I remember how it was in those first few years before the regulations. So This is the Libertarian Ideal... do away with the laws that make life livable and let \"business\" do whatever it can get away with... its anarchy everywhere. It _will_ get much worse before the pendulum finishes the swing and starts to swing back. Every eighty or so years we have to re-learn the lessons of the past. So right now we are just \"post depression\" and we don't have a world war to revitalize our economy, so we've skipped to the fifties where business was king and nobody vaccinates their kids (this time because nobody really remembers Polio) and \"'the free market' will protect the environment (was 'the worker' that the free market was going to protect in the fifties, but same thing now as well).\" Paying \"blacks\" a living wage was going to bankrupt the economy because wages would be too high (of course when that was laid to rest the economy boomed because more money was flowing). Basically that thing where \"those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it\" is happening right now in spades. If you are middle-ish class then the first signs are going to hit you in your daily utilities; your phone, internet advertising, vehicle repair could be next, who knows. In other classes it's blaming unskilled imagrents for the loss of your skilled job, and blaming the poor instead of your boss even though your (now ex-) boss is the one who fired you and shipped your job overseas. It's part of a giant cycle. The particular nouns get swapped around. \"Inter-Racial\" was swapped out for \"Gay\" in the marriage and morality debate. \"Illegal Mexicans\" was swapped out for \"Blacks\" in the jobs and civil safety line items. Spam email and spam phone calls were swapped in, in place of door-to-door and direct mail marketing. Eighty years ago the movie industry tried to technologically enforce copyright as a technological problem by using special lenses and non-standard film gauges and gates, now it's encryption and format licenses. So while it may seem like a stretch right now, what you are seeing with the robocalls is the thin, visible edge of the wedge breaking through the regulatory protections from the far side of the legal wall. It goes hand-in-hand with the recent law allowing your ISP to sell your private browsing history. It was strongly presaged by Citizens United and the less obvious Kelo v. City of New London. By convincing the people that their protections were \"government overreach\", particular moneyed interests have basically broken some key supports in our civil society. And now, for instance, T-Mobile has a deal where my phone says \"suspected spam caller\" for many numbers. That's a feature they offer (e.g. sell, well include in your service as a selling point). Soon you too will be able to pay, individually, for a feature that used to be part of the regulatory domain provided by government for 1 ten-thousandth the cost. (End Rant)",
"I have noticed an extreme spike of these calls, mostly from local numbers. I used the \"refuse and send message\" option on my phone a few times. Mostly I get an immediate bounced message, but once I got a \"who is this\" message. Turns out the number was spoofed and actually belonged to someone.",
"Lately, I have been missing several calls a day from different local numbers. At first I tried to call them back thinking a friend changed numbers or a job interview, however when someone did answer they would quickly inform me that they were returning my phone call even though I never call any. Turns out this new spoofing technology uses my phone number to call others. Although I have not gotten in robocalls, I just get the returned calls. Slightly more annoying because I ended up in a 20 minute conversation with a nice old man about how I needed to stop calling him.",
"It's weird. T-Mobile has the callers listed as \"Scam Likely\" and I figured that they were catching on to the people who were calling or the algorithm that was designed to create local numbers. If anyone wants to clarify this as well- I'd appreciate it.",
"Because you're not answering with the phone with, \"Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Investigator Andrew Garvey.\" Do that and the calls will stop REAL quick.",
"4 times in one day, local and state numbers. They hang up immediately when I say \"take me off the list\" Time to lawyer up and go hunting."
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6j3del | How does Wine (software that runs Windows programs on Linux) work? | I thought Wine was some sort of emulator until I found out that it's actually an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. Can someone explain the difference between an emulator and a compatibility layer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's kind of confusing, because Wine emulates system calls of the Windows operating system, but it is not a virtual machine. A true emulator would actually run the same OS code a Windows machine would run, via a virtual machine. Wine is a different program that emulates the runtime environment for Windows by translating system calls a program running on Windows would make to system calls compliant with Linux. So you are actually running Windows applications on Linux OS with Wine, as opposed to using a virtual machine which would be the equivalent of running Windows applications on Windows OS."
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6j426t | Why is it a such big deal to have a 20, 50, or even 100qubit processor, when it seems like it's a pathetically small number to do anything with? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What is a pathetically small number? Going 0.5MPH is slow. Going 0.5C is insanely fast. The point is, it's a quantum computer. URL_0 > This is where the concept of “quantum supremacy” – being able to conclusively demonstrate the ability to perform a calculation that a classical computer cannot – comes into play. To check the validity of such a computation would require today’s best supercomputers and, according to Martinis, the most they could compete with is a 50-qubit quantum computer – any more qubits and a supercomputer won’t be enough.",
"In a quantum computer, it's the memory that does the computation. Each additional quibit doubles the computational power of the machine."
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6j6ycr | Why is it so hard for law enforcement to locate and bust scam call centers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"**tl;dr**: the scammers hide behind VoIP services that are very different from what you use on your wireline at home or mobile phone. Law enforcement jurisdictional issues aside. It's technically difficult to impossible to identify the source of these calls, even to identify those that are enabling it along the way. Tracing calls as made famous in movies or making it easy to report these calls wont help. Yes, VoIP is at the heart of this, but it's the way VoIP is implemented here, specifically how ANI is implemented. Forgive the acronyms, it's just how telephony rolls. Each phone call that you receive has a couple of pieces of information that goes along with it: **ANI**: automatic number identifier; added to each call by the Local Exchange Carrier aka \"the phone company\". It is not so easy for users (e.g. VoIP subscribers) to spoof. Originally created for billing long distance calls it is also used by 911 services. It is a string of digits that include the calling party number, and some other flags and codes that identify party lines, PBX, payphones, etc. etc. Sometimes this is called \"Super Caller ID\". **CPID**: calling party ID aka \"caller id\"; This is what is actually displayed on your phone. By design, it can be altered and VoIP subscribers like the scammers do. The [Truth in Caller ID Act]( URL_1 ) made it a crime to alter this information to cause harm, but in this context, the law isn't worth the paper it's written on. There are a couple of other technologies going on that are not delivered with the call that are relevant here: **ALI**: automatic location identification. A database, maintained by the phone compan(y|ies) that the Public Safety Answering Point (where your 911 calls go locally) can query. In the case of wireline services, its a simple mapping of your address to your phone number. In the case of wireless service (mobile/cell phones), it's providing the location of the nearest cell tower or most recently the phone itself (via GPS). **E911** is a [FCC requirement]( URL_2 ) that mandates calls include ANI and the phone companies maintain ALI. Signing up for 911 services was optional for VoIP subscribers until the FCC changed their stance in 2005 following a lawsuit involving Vonage. **Fully Interconnected** enables users to place *and* receive calls over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The person who flooded the scammers with calls was dealing with a rare, extremely stupid scammer who was likely using this kind of service and was also dumb enough to let their incoming number(s) be known. **DOD** direct outward dial; enables users to place but not receive PSTN calls. This is what most scammers use and why they try to keep you on the phone, you couldn't call them back if you wanted to. This is why most advice you hear about phone scammers is to simply hang up. So what does all this mean to the scammers? Any self-respecting scammers is buying non-fully interconnected DOD services from VoIP providers. Not only is it cheaper, this type of service does not need to be E911 compliant so the ANI that is delivered by these calls all have the same ANI which identifies the point where thousands of numbers are connected to the PSTN, but not the calling number itself. The scammers can do as they please with CPID making using it in a blocking mechanism close to pointless. So why not why not block based on the far more difficult to manipulate ANI? The FCC has pretty much washed their hands of ANI handing it over to phone companies: \"instead of requiring that ANI blocking be made available to subscribers, the Commission required carriers offering ANI services to limit the permissible uses of ANI\". So if we know which VoIP companies are enabling these scammers, why not go after them? If you read the Truth in Caller ID Act you might think that it could hold telecom providers accountable for transmitting spoofed caller id, but [courts have disagreed with this]( URL_0 ) The practical answer is that most if not all of these companies are enabling this. Voice services are a commodity now, often sold by resellers. Even if the chain of middlemen were unraveled, the scammer has probably moved onto a new, cheaper VoIP service and is hiding behind VPN on the internet side of the call anyway. source: I've worked in the telecom industry for 25 years, both on the PSTN side for Bell Canada and on the intertubes side for Cisco. edit: spelling",
"Well this can be tricky for a number of reasons. But the most basic is jurisdiction. Now I'm not in the law profession, but I am in the computer profession. It isn't overly hard with today's tech to make your location seem like it's somewhere that it isn't. Just as one example I purchased my cell phone in one state and so got an area code from that state, but now live in a totally different state. So every now and then when I call up someone I haven't called before there is a brief on the other end \"I was wondering who was calling me from Washington state\". Heck I even still get that when I call up my parents on their house line and they know my phone has a Washington area code. As you can see with such a simple example we've now involved three states in any activity I might be doing with my phone. The state I'm in, the state I'm calling, and the state where people think I might be based on the phone number. Sure if I do something seriously wrong you can bet the states are going to co-operate, and if need be my cell phone company will likely provide information. But expand it out to remembering that often the scammers aren't actually calling from inside the country of the people they are scamming. So now instead of needing to just get co-operation between three states and one phone company, you are needing cooperation between foreign countries and multiple companies. Now let's make it even worse. Sure in the Untied States we have 911 for emergency numbers, but if I asked you right now who do you call if someone tries to scam you, would you know? Sadly there isn't some general number that we all know as a culture to call to report scammers. Furthermore most people won't even report it. How often have people received a scam phone call and just hung up the phone? Even once you have identified what legal entity is responsible for tracking down the scammers in the correct jurisdiction, they ultimately need those reports of scams happening before they can do anything. And while they will get those reports and will act, as you can see with all the bureaucratic tape and just nature of life stuff in the way it makes it a slow moving machine, meaning the scammers have a window of time to operate in before they have to change tactics. edit add: Legit advise I can give you if you want to help stop scammers as a \"normal\" person that isn't some hacker like the video you mentioned. If you get a call or email from a scammer pretending to be some agency that they are not (such as a bank or the IRS or any number of things scammers like to pretend to be)... then if they are pretending to be a legit organisation, send what information you were able to gather to the real version of that organisation. As scammers like to pretend to be big organizations, you can bet the real version of those organizations has a legal department that might like that information. edit add 2: Thanks for the gold kind stranger.",
"Throwaway for obvious reasons. A few years ago I worked in a scammer call center for a while. First reason: international corporate structure. Our actual call center was in Europe and the company I worked for was incorporated in Europe, but the company that the clients saw was in the Seychelles. Of course this was a sham, there were no headquarters there or anything, but officially it was the Seychelles company doing the business and paying the call center company - my employer - to handle customer service. Obviously the same people owned both companies. Our clients, or rather victims, were mostly from USA, Canada, Australia, UK and the usual scam was for $200 - $500. Because of the corporate structure, pretty much no law enforcement agency will bother with a $200 scam. Second reason: people are ashamed of being scammed. When you look back on a scam, it seems obvious. While I was there at least 3000 people were scammed, some for $200, some for $5000. But on our public Facebook page there was only like 2 or 3 angry customers, all were replied to by our trustful \"PR\" guys and convinced that their situation is a mistake, an outlier. If all those people got together and wanted to go after us, I'm reasonably sure they would succeed. But in reality, very few of them wanted to speak up. Third reason: sometimes those scams aren't illegal per se. My former company was on the verge - it was kind of legal, kind of not, heavily dependent on where our customers were. In my last 2 months there we stopped calling US customers because they were making too much trouble for us and it was technically illegal for us to sell them what we sold, but from a legal point of view the rest of the world was basically fair game. Fourth reason: psychological tricks. Our \"customer retention\" guys were working hard to convince the customers that it was their own fault that the product didn't work for them. In the end, only a small percentage (I'd say 10-15%) actually felt scammed, and out of that an even smaller percentage were willing to speak up. Out of the ~3000 customers I've witnessed being scammed, we got about 20 chargebacks and not a single lawyer contact us. Out of the tens of thousands we called, not one made any real trouble. PS: AMA, for anyone that's interested.",
"So many of them are overseas using VOiP to make the call over the internet. If someone is in South Africa at a call center and calls Chicago, the call travel over the internet to say Arizona, where they are picked up by a local exchange and then sent on the plain ol telephone system to Chicago. Now Chicago police cannot go to Arizona to arrest anyone, by the time a federal agency gets involved, the VOiP traffic is no longer going to Arizona, but California, where it is redistributed. tl/dr Calls go over the Internet and can be hard to trace, or lead out of country.",
"VPN's and call centers that are more than likely out of the country. Getting international cooperation from law enforcement for perceived non serious matters is extremely hard. In addition, there is a feeling out there among many in law enforcement that if you think the IRS contacting you and asking you to make payment in iTunes gift cards is legit and you do make payment then you deserve to be scammed. I certainly don't hold that feeling but many do.",
"I work as a Network surveillance Tech, for a Tele communications and Internet Service provider. In my experience it comes down to police not having fast enough cooperation across borders to do it. Let me explain. Even if the scammer spoofs his numbers. The last service provider in the chain before the call is delivered to your country, still has to provide our network with their ID, before we are willing to accept the call. This means we can trace it to that service provider. Typically the scammer will have call forwarding services in several countries where law enforcement is unlikely to care or are slow to react. So this is where it gets Tricky... If you report a Scammer. Police will get a Warrent for your service providers records of the call. They will then be able to trace the call to the first service provider outside your country. Police then have to contact law enforcement in that country. Get a warrent for the records and then contact the next countries law enforcement. Now in most countries there are laws, about how long a service provider has to store call data. Some places its 6 months others its 30days, and some countries have no laws at all on the subject. If the scammer has setup enough call forwarding centres, especially in countries with a short data retention time. The sheer amount of red tape Law enforcement needs to go through to find the next step in the chain, means that the data may have expired, and has been deleted before they get to the source. Now Imagine If every service provider was willing to cooperate and juristiction wasnt a thing. Every movie ever, where you see them tracing a call, you see a line criss cross a map of the world. In reality this would only takes seconds at most, not minutes. But Jurisdiction is a thing and service providers have to protect their networks and costumers from unwarrented tracking of their activities. The amount of work law enforcement needs to put in to getting anywhere near the scammer, only to fail because they run out of time, means that they rarely do anything. Their time is better spent investigating other crimes.",
"The guy didn't actually hack the scammers. He had their phone number and made a program to call them constantly. The program was pretty simple. There's a service called Twilio that lets you write programs that can call or send texts in an automated way. It's a subscription service that a lot of companies use to implement phone features in their products. So he wrote a program that used Twilio to send a few dozen calls each second to this number. That way it basically choked out their ability to get any other calls from victims. I can't comment as to why it's hard to close down scam operations in foreign countries though. I don't know anything about that.",
"Many of these scam call centers are able to trick law enforcement into thinking they're a legitimate business. It's possible that these call centers were or still are legitimate businesses. For example, look at [Comantra]( URL_0 ), an Indian-based call center that was a Microsoft business partner until they were found to be scamming users. I know that my explanation mostly applies to computer support scams, but I don't doubt for a moment that the IRS, insurance, and bank scams are done from the same facilities. It's not that law enforcement and service providers aren't trying. These scams do get shut down quite frequently, but the people are still on the loose, able to find another exploit until they slip up and get caught for real, which does happen, but not very often, because career criminals tend to be good at covering their tracks.",
"URL_0 Says there wasn't a lot of interest in the arrests from the American authorities",
"Whenever I get a call from a number that's not in my contacts list I let it go to voicemail. It works great. If they leave a message then I know it is important. If not, then it's not important.",
"Waste their time. The most expensive resource they have is their actual time talking to you. Have a nice conversation about the weather while 'gathering your documents'. If enough people did that, it wouldn't be a profitable scam and they'll stop.",
"they normally setup call centers in countries where law enforcement is lax or they can bribe their way out of trouble. think of countries like Nigeria and Kenya. also international laws or treaties (or lack of it) can make things hard or expensive to go after those scammers. see this article for an example - URL_0",
"Most of the wording done by the agent is nebulous and they do their best to make their victim say most things for them by pushing subjects. Plus call centers are all over and if it's not in the same country as someone suing it's quite hard to get anything done, especially with lax laws in certain countries.",
"Why can't the phone companies cooperate to block them? If my phone company is X they know either they originated the call or it came from companies A, B or C. If the handful of cell and landline companies that exist flagged the calls as from overseas or outside of their networks I would have those all sent to voicemail.",
"Because we don't know where they are located. ~~All calls in North America are routed through a switching board (I believe located in Canada) responsible for tracking and showing the caller ID.~~ (I was apparently seriously misremembering when I woke up this morning.) The phone numbers are all administered through the North American Numbering Plan, which is responsible for maintaining the database of phone numbers. However, robocalls spoof their caller ID. Frequently, they're located off-shore and will route their calls through at least one if not 2 or 3 other countries before the call goes through the N.American switch boards. These counties are often the types that are unwilling to keep accurate logs. As a result, the robocalls can basically continue in perpetuity. FCC Infographic: URL_0",
"Download TrueCaller on your phone. It tells you if its a scammer, its basically URL_0 in app form. Shows the ID or nickname people have reported as, examples: Scam, Spam, Robocall, Credit Services, Mortgage, Spamalot, Loans....etc",
"I work as an online retailer. There is a known area of Miami where credit card scams originate. I've called every organization I know, cops, government, credit card companies. NO ONE CARES. The transactions are too small, the cost of stopping this from happening too high. The government only cares about terrorism and national security--their words. Law enforcement doesn't 'have the time nor manpower'. Because my Merchant Services department does not release credit card numbers and without those, the credit card companies will not talk to me. My point. There are private groups that post the information on these people--down to the address of the warehouse group where they work, but no one with any authority cares that it is happening. It is the same with such scams. I no longer ship to Florida without making a time consuming call to the person ordering.",
"The government found and is going after one guy in Miami right now. There are many others that have been shut down. So why do so many continue? 1) The government is restricted in the tools it can use because it can't break the law or risk possibly breaking the law. Moreover, it must not get in a position where it's investigation can't be used as evidence of technical means. They want more than to stop it, they want convictions. 2) These operations are easy to setup and tear down so the scammer can stay on the move, always one step ahead of law enforcement 3) Jurisdiction, they may be out of the country. Personally I think that we need regulations that put the onus on US phone companies to monitor for and identify these call centers and disallow their use of the network. They should be identifiable by their pattern of abuse.",
"Law enforcement in America isn't designed to police businesses. It's designed to bust and jail poor people for non-violent crimes and keep the income flowing from \"seizures\" and the jail cells full for corporate prisons. There is simply no money in bothering with telemarketers.",
"The best way to stop these guys would be to issue credit cards to people that are not cards used to make purchases, but to identify fraud. So if you play along with the scammer and give them this card #, their credit card count is immediately frozen and after an investigation, the funds are returned to the scammed people. I know it's probably not possible, but the way to stop this is to make it so that the scammers can't collect the money. That's how you stop them.",
"There's no good, simple reporting system. The SS7 system does allow calls to be traced, but there's no mechanism where an ordinary use can 'flag' a call as a nuisance call. Really, what I'm saying is that the telephone needs a karma system, and the Telco just needs to disconnect people with negative karma.",
"No one cares enough to tackle it. 'Fixing' this issue doesn't matter. While a lot of people get scammed, not the right people are affacted. You would need to create a taskforce, you need to file lawsuites against the voip provider or have to work together with them. they have to filter illegal use like vpn and illegal credit cards and change there policies and than start blocking accounts. They also would need to work with indian policies which might or not might help. It also complate things - > costs more money and time. Everything of this is not cheap. It is easy to understand, but lot of people don't report it, lots of people are not affected."
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6j96gv | Why do text messages (still) not have the ability to be expressed with (at least) bold and italics? (And other text markup/down) | I would think it to be entirely possible, and especially probably on iPhone's iMessage platform, if not standardized across the board. Just like emojis. Why hasn't this been implemented? ((Example of markdown formatting *used here* **on** ***Reddit***)) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To understand that you have to understand how text messages are sent. Your phone has to periodically ping the cell network to alert the towers to its presence. Likewise, the towers have to ping the phone back to let the phone know it's connected to the network. It's a short blip of nonsense characters just to ensure that the phone has a solid connection and knows which towers to connect to, etc. Someone realized that instead of sending nonsense, you could piggyback a message onto that signal. Why not? The signal has to be sent regardless, so with just a small amount of routing information attached your phone will send your text with the outgoing signal and your friend will receive the text on their phone's next check-in with their cell tower. That's the reason for the character limit, incidentally: the signal is short, and some of it is reserved for important data about your phone or the network (you know, the original purpose for the signal), some of it has to be reserved for the routing information (your phone number and the number of the person receiving it) and what's left over gets used for your text. Because of that limit in the size of the message, formatting isn't worth the trouble. Formatting takes data. Why bother? Reddit's formatting uses asterisks (*) and underscores (_) but that's not universal. It's fairly standard among social media platforms these days, but there's no actual standard, it's just everyone kind of accidentally recognizing that it's a decent way to do it. Then again, Slack bolds with asterisks and italicizes with underscores, which is different from Reddit. With each phone using 1) different carrier services, 2) different operating systems, 3) different SMS applications, there would be no standard and your two asterisks might come out italics to you, but bold to someone else, in the same way that [Android emoticons]( URL_0 ) turn < 3 into a face with heart eyes but another phone carrier doesn't. So text messages are kept in plaintext - no formatting because it would take more data than it's worth including, and no ad hoc formatting through characters like Reddit because no one would be using the same formatting.",
"It's actually coming! It's called RCS (Rich Communication Services) and the biggest pusher to make it happen right now is Google. RCS supports proper fancy markup, read receipts, automatically identifying if another user supports RCS (so it can behave like iMessage and automatically use the better messaging system or switch to SMS if needed), and various other bells and whistles you've come to expect in an IM client. The difference is unlike iMessage which is simply a \"normal\" data connection to a server Apple has full control over (and no one else), RCS will be implemented in such a way that it's instead a shared standard between all the phone carriers. That's the part that makes it slow, before you can properly roll out the system everyone has to be onboard and upgrade their tech to support it. Which is happening, bit by bit."
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6jaljh | Why do iPhone chargers break so fast? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The apple lightning cables especially appear to be designed to look pretty. As evidenced by a lack of strain relief, and thin wires/insulation, little consideration was given for the lifespan of the cable; essentially a consumable."
],
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6
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|
6jbo6g | Why can YouTube's mobile app seamlessly transition between video quality, where as on desktops, the video has to pause and buffer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"djd3753",
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"text": [
"I have an additional and releated question to this, why is it that the twitch app can stream flawlessly but the chat stops working after like 30 seconds?",
"Apps have a lot more control over their own video streaming than websites. In the YouTube app it can load the video into its own memory buffer and play from there, so when you change quality it keeps playing the previous quality video it's already buffered and starts buffering the new quality from that point onwards. As soon it hits the end of one buffer it can switch to the other one. You can see it happen, if you change the quality while the video is playing you can see it takes a few seconds for the new quality Browsers don't give you as much control over how the video loads. You can't load the video separately and play it from there like the app does you rely on the browser to load and play video itself, so it's not as easy to create seamless video changes like that."
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6jfszz | How does one film a shot of someone looking into a mirror from their perspective? | In like a TV show or a movie, how do we see someone's POV as they are looking into a mirror? Wouldn't you see the camera? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"djdwfc7"
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"text": [
"It's a simple trick. They angle the mirror so that the performer is actually looking at the camera, not herself. Now the camera is looking at her. In a few cases they use digital video editing instead, and just fake the mirror image, editing in something the recorded separately."
],
"score": [
8
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6jft4p | Why do cars no longer need the giant antenna on the front to pick up signals? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dje7asl",
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"text": [
"Trucks still have them. In passenger cars with plastic bodies the antenna can be hidden. So too in window glass. Additionally receivers are \"better\" now days because discrete electronics are more sensitive than in the fifties and sixties, so it takes less input signal strength for a digital tuner to operate, meaning some of the antennas can be physically smaller (like 1/4 wave instead of 1/2 wave in length). Plus we don't care abut AM reception much in the U.S. any more and so FM reception is the bigger drive. So the technology has just made the process less intrusive at every level. Even your cell phone has (or can have) an FM radio in it, though it's usually disabled in the U.S. for business reasons (selling you data plans). So really the FM radio antenna has gotten quite small over the years.",
"Better technology means stronger signals being sent to the vehicle when compared to older cars. And newer technology also meant those big antennae could get smaller. The same thing happened with cell towers too (they got smaller over time). Old-time antennae on cars were just off-setting weaker signals. Cars of the past needed them to receive signals with quality (low static). Today, the signal is stronger so the antennae is unnecessary. But the car still does have a next-generation of \"antennae-receiver\". It's just smaller than those old wire types."
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6jfy0v | Why can't my phone simultaneously use wifi and data? | And, given that that my phone is limited to the one or the other, why is my connection interrupted whenever I switch between wifi and data? Is is possible (i.e. does the technology exist) to switch seamlessly between the two? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"(Don't know about iphone) If you are using Android go to settings > WiFi and turn on smart network switch. I belive this feature exist in all android devices could be wrong. And if you are using Samsung devices you can use WiFi and mobile data simultaneously when downloading certain files just turn on Download booster(4g required).",
"Although in both cases you might be trying to send data to or receive data from the same server, you're using physically separate hardware to do it--one, a system designed for communicating with routers over Wi-Fi, and the other, a system for telephone communication. These also operate on different frequencies. The operating system must decide to send the signal through one or the other. In principle you could use both, but then you really have two separate connections, which will receive two separate responses. \"Seamless\" switching between the two is difficult because one of the connections has to fail before switching--otherwise, you would get inconsistent responses by mixing the two."
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7,
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6jg6mr | Why do computers have to download and install software? What's the difference between the two and why can't it install as it's downloading? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"One gathers the files, one applies it. Depending on what it is, if you started installing before you had all the pieces of the file, and something happened to the download, bad things could potentially happen.",
"It is possible to install as it downloads, if there is a system in place to handle that. That's exactly what happens when you download a game on a PS4. It downloads the data directly where it needs to go so there's no extra install step. You don't even need to wait for it to finish downloading the whole thing before playing the game. But on Windows there is no built in system to do that (at least not one that all software uses). So you typically have to download an installer first and then run that. For some software packages that installer does actually download and install the rest of the data as its going along. But others contain all the data it needs in the initial download, and then you need the installer to put it all in the right place so you can run the program.",
"think of it like a meal. downloading is cooking. installing is eating. you can't eat while it is cooking, right? the computer has to download everything it needs to do a full install. lots of downloads download bits and pieces of information separately and then make it whole at the end. and the bits and pieces are not necessarily downloaded in the order that the computer needs to install correctly. so it may download stuff needed at the end first, for example"
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6jh1hs | Why is a mouse more accurate than a joystick on a controller | Thanks for answers! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because a movement on a joystick applies \"velocity\" but movement on a mouse applies a position change. Think about it, you move a joystick to the left, it will keep going left even though your hand is not moving anything, just keeping the joystick on the left side. A mouse on the other hand requires movement to apply this change, stopping this movement will stop this movement. This is simply something more natural and understood to humans.",
"Because with a computer mouse you move it exactly X distance on the table so the cursor moves Y distance. With a joystick, you essentially 'toggle' the cursors movement in any given direction, for a certain length of time, until the cursor reaches what you need. It's also less accurate because you're dealing with a fixed joystick instead of a mouse that you can move all the way across your desk if you wanted to. This is my interpretation of it, anyway"
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6jh77n | Why did cell phone interference with speakers used to happen, and why has it since resolved? | In the earlier times of cell phones, when receiving a phone call, speakers nearby would temporarily [play an interference pattern]( URL_0 ). I have'nt heard the sound in many years, and was wondering why | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dje7enx"
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"text": [
"Switch on bands to Lte. Once in awhile, when my phone is on edge or 3g, I still get interference. But since almost everyone has an LTE phone, it's on a different wavelength."
],
"score": [
6
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6jhfzr | How does https hide visited websites from internet service providers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dje9bb2"
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"text": [
"It does not hide which websites you visit. However it encrypts (scrambles with an algoritm) the communication so they cannot see what you are doing on the website."
],
"score": [
3
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|
6jjn1q | How does a listening voice assistant like "OK Google" not totally drain the battery? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djeqnlr",
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"text": [
"It does. This is why low battery mode in phones disables voice assistant's automatic listening. It has to process all sound it hears for the right keywords and that isn't a task done without needing power.",
"As another reply has said, it does. It's worth mentioning Apple's solution here. Because of the battery drain, early incarnations of \"Hey Siri\" only worked when the device was plugged into a charger. That prevented battery drain. But then they started adding a special chip to their devices (someone will be able to tell you exactly which device got it first, I think it was the iPhone 6S but I may be wrong). This chip has one job and one job only - to listen for you saying \"Hey Siri\". Because it's so specialised, they were able to design it to use less power than a general-purpose chip would need to do the same job, and so they allowed Hey Siri to work even when you're not charging your device."
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6jkbmc | Why does Facebook seem to be overrun with still images as videos lately? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djew6nx",
"djewah0"
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"text": [
"Facebook Slideshow - it is a feature they released last year. Facebook wants you to share more stuff on Facebook - so it's rolling out a new feature designed to do just that. The social network thinks video is the answer to all its woes. According to The Information, Facebook has experienced a decline in original, personal sharing (it's down 21 per cent year over year as of mid-2015), but Live Video and video seem to be helping. People are no longer keen to post text statuses about what's going on in their lives, but they will post stories full of videos and pics to their Snapchats, for instance. Facebook isn't Snapchat, though. Users aren't limited to 10-second clips they can overlay with doodles, text, filters, etc. But they can post 20-minute videos and boring, static photos to albums. While Facebook Live is slowly adding some Snapchat-like features, the social network still has to make the process of posting videos and pics much more fun not only for users but also for people looking at this stuff in their feeds. That's why Facebook is now pushing an automatic movie-maker feature called Slideshow. It's similar to the new Memories feature coming to iOS 10's Photos app, and it's also a lot like the Movies Assistant feature in Google Photos. Slideshow, which originally launched in August as part of Facebook's photo-sharing app Moments, basically takes your recent videos and pics and spices them up a bit. You don't need to download an entirely new app to use Slideshow. The Facebook app will sync with your phone's libraries and is able to detect when you've taken five or more videos/pics in the last 24 hours. Facebook will then gather the media into a slideshow and create a preview of it at the top of your News Feed. You can ignore it or post it. The choice is yours. You can even customise it. The idea is you can now jazz up your lame videos and pics and turn them into something worth sharing (and watching). __________________________________________________________________________________________________ [Source]( URL_0 )",
"I thought it was to prevent the saving of the picture or meme that's being displayed in the video by someone else other than the original creator."
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6jl1rg | Why can't popular websites seem to keep malvertisements from appearing, especially for mobile sites? | I frequently visit image links from Reddit that point to Tumblr, and I'd guess that about 10% of the time, I get redirected to a page that is styled like google, and claims my phone is infected with some virus. Going back only causes a new fake warning to show. I have to close the browser completely to resume what I'm doing. I'd think that a popular site such as Tumblr would keep these bad advertisers away but either they can't or don't care. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djf0qup"
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"text": [
"Most websites don't care what ads appear. They only care about how much the ad pays per click. So if the website (say reddit) has both a malware ad and a legit say amazon ad, and the malware ad payed $1.50 per click where as amazon payed $0.60 per click they would prefer the malware to stay. Although they cant really control what ads appear. It depends on cookies (tracking things) that see what you like to search on google or amazon, and it also depends on the sites content. Source: I once abused google adsense to make money from ads. Worked for a little while but I was shut down"
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6jl316 | Why do consoles still need discs even after installing in order to play a game? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"For the newest consoles where the data is installed to the hard disk, it's just to make sure you own the game. The disc is essentially a licence key. They could have gone with a system like Steam where even if you buy something on a disc, you get a license key that links the game to your account. But that would make second hand sales impossible and console gamers aren't keen on that.",
"It is purely to prove that you still own the game, otherwise you could just install the game and then return it to the store. Until consoles adopt the PC method of CD games requiring a one time use CD key it will have to stay that way.",
"Sometimes, it's because some of the data is still stored on the disc, to make the installation smaller. But most of the time, it's for anti-piracy purposes. You could copy the game data from one hard drive to another, but requiring the physical copy ensures only one copy is run at a time."
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6jlsbo | How does South Korea have the "fastest internet in the world"? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djf5mbd",
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"text": [
"South Korea is a very small country with a large population. Thus, the cost of laying infrastructure is often lower than sparsely populated countries. DSL is still very popular, and very inexpensive to provide to dense apartment.",
"South Korea has the fastest \"average\" internet speed. It is an achievement but not that tough. It is home to technology companies such as Samsung and LG who invest a lot in the local community. Plus South Korea has a small area with most of the population, almost 25% concentrated in once city that is Seoul. Having really high internet speeds in just Seoul raises the average speed of the whole country."
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6jm4df | How does military check for people in radius of atomic weapon test? | There has been hundreds of atomic weapons tests. How is military sure that there is no living people in 100km radius or however big the explosion is? Pretty sure they kill animals but we never hear about people who died during those tests. If there was so many and explosions are so huge, there must have been casualties right? How come we never hear about those tests too... | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The tests were generally done on areas that were under military control with low population densities. E.g., the Nevada Test Site is an Air Force bombing range. In the Pacific tests, this was more of a problem since while you could identify inhabited islands nearby, you could not always control for the seas themselves. Surveys were made with airplanes to confirm that ships were out of the \"danger zone,\" and the danger zone itself was publicly known (ships were told in advance to avoid it). Keeping people outside of the area of the immediate explosion is generally not the problem, though it requires accurate understanding of the explosive effects, which can be complex (e.g. the first Soviet H-bomb test resulted in several fatalities because the blast wave reflected off an inversion layer in the atmosphere, which extended its power more than expected). The truly difficult problem is in keeping them safe from fallout, which depends on wind conditions that can change, and truly massive areas (tens of thousands of square miles). The most famous incident of this sort was during the Castle Bravo test, where the fallout plume was much larger than expected (and thus drifted over inhabited islands, which were evacuated), and a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, ended up exposed because it [was very close to the danger zone when the bomb went off]( URL_0 ) (it was within an \"expanded danger zone\" that was created after the fact). This lead to exposure of the crew to radioactivity, and one fatality. There were also issues with \"downwinders\" at the Nevada Test Site (people who lived in towns where clouds ended up crossing and depositing radioactivity) and downwind of the Soviet test site in Kazakhstan. In the US case, they would try to track the clouds and tell people living downwind not to go outside when it was passing over them — not an ideal approach.",
"Most of these tests were in two areas: 1) Pacific islands. Here it's pretty easy to look for people: there's only so many surrounding islands. 2) The Nevada Test Site. This is a huge chunk of Nevada completely controlled by the military. They know no one lives there. Plus, as far as we know (and this day and age we'd probably know), the US no longer conducts nuclear tests anywhere.",
"Although these kinds of tests haven't been conducted in some time... Satellite imagery, including thermal imaging, can check for any nearby living beings. This, combined with modern security, can effectively secure even a very large site for use as bomb testing. Every nation with known nuclear weapon capability has **large** swaths of land and sea available for testing that have very limited interaction with the public, even when they aren't being controlled for that specific use. The USA has large swathes of desert and sea available, Russia has more uninhabited area than most countries combined. The UK and France have many islands available that are either uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. China has huge mountain ranges with no known inhabitants."
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6jnj8i | Why is it detrimental to laptop batteries if left plugged in for extended periods of time and do mobile phones fall victim to this dame problem over time? | Edit: Same | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To answer your second question: > do mobiles phones fall victim to this dame [sic] problem over time? Yes. --- Now to answer the first. Think of modern batteries (lithum-ion) as balloons, the charge they hold is the air that you blow into it (voltage). When you charge the balloon, when do you stop? There's a point where the balloon will blow, this is also true for batteries (Galaxy Note 7 being a good example). What manufacturers do is limit how much you can inflate the balloon to make sure it doesn't blow, however, the limit is usually high because people love big balloons (high battery life), this means if you keep your balloon at maximum charge, the rubber is left stretched and it results in wear. The difference with a lithum-ion battery is that it works both ways, undercharging is as bad as overcharging, so keeping the battery between ~30% and 80% is the best. This is obviously not a \"true\" answer, a real answer requires advanced chemistry understanding which is not fit for ELI5, instead I'll point you to a great website that will explain way better than I ever could: URL_0",
"My understanding is that Li-polymer/[Li-ion]( URL_0 ) batteries have the longest life when they're between 30% and 70%. Extended times below or above that put stress on them and shorten their lives.",
"Shit, I typically buy laptops, plug them in, and don't unplug them for YEARS at a time. I don't need the mobile functionality - so I should be okay, right?",
"It's a myth. Old battery types, such as NiCd had such problems. Modern batteries are quite robust, and handled by intelligent charging circuitry. You can pretty much abuse them whatever way you want. Run them dry (there is circuitry preventing undercharge), keep them topped up at all time, cycle them, it doesn't matter. There might be a measureable difference, but it won't be a noticeable difference. So, with modern batteries, it doesn't matter. Use them as you like, and stop perpetuating a myth based on something that doesn't apply anymore. Chances are that the device is olde before the batteries are old anyway.",
"Most modern batteries that are Lithium based have micro controllers that won't let you discharge/overcharge the battery past the point which would be detrimental. A lot of older Nickel Cadmium and Hydride had what is called memory effect, which after repeatedly charging the battery from near full charge (80-90%) to full (100%), would slowly degrade the full charge capacity. Modern batteries used in handheld electronics typically don't have this issue. Modern batteries have a higher discharge rate and capacity, but they can have swelling issues due to how the chemicals themselves interact. In the factory the cells in the batteries are layered, and usually have a vent hole, which is sealed once the battery is assembled. If the chemicals in the battery for whatever reason start a unintended reaction which produces a gas *can happen for several reasons*, you get swelling, and as a consequence very often reduced capacity. I have seen a lot of laptops nowadays taking the possibility of swelling into account when it comes to design. I believe the older Macbook Pro's had it where when the batteries expand, the weak point is directly below the trackpad, there by having the trackpad buldge up slowly rather than the underside violently rupturing. As a side note, batteries now a days are built with safety in mind. Just a decade ago Lithium Ion batteries came in hard containers, which when they swelled typically burst violently. If you have a removable battery on your phone, there is a good chance the material on the outside is softer, allowing for safe expansion. Remember never to pierce the container as the gas built up will release, and can be a very strong irritant if directly exposed to skin/lungs/eyes.",
"My laptop charges to full and then changes to a plugged in but not charging mode until the battery falls a bit. Does this help to solve any issue?"
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6joxi8 | how noise cancelling headphones work. | Sounds like magic to me. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They generate something called destructive waves. URL_0 They have a microphone on the outside of the headphones, which listen to sounds around you. They then generate the \"opposite\" sound, which cancels out the ambient noise, leaving only silence.",
"They actually listen to the external sounds with a microphone that picks up external audio, and then creates sound waves at a frequency that are inaudible to the human ear, those sound waves cancel out (neutralize) the sound waves from the external noise. Hence, why they're called noise canceling, and not noise blocking. The sound waves from the external noises are still there, your ear just doesn't detect them because of the other sound waves that neutralize them"
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6jpv8n | Why does 1% battery life last longer than any other percent? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The battery life indicator on a device is indicative only. Modern devices take a particularly active approach to battery management. In order to maximise battery life, a device migh fast charge the battery up to 100% when it's first plugged in, then allow it discharge down to 85% while still plugged in, then alternate between periods of fast charging, trickle charging and discharging until the device is unplugged. This means that at any point when it's plugged in, the actual charge in the battery could be anywhere from 85% to 100%. Importantly though, the battery display sits on 100% the whole time because the device doesn't think you need to know about all the fiddling around it is doing. When you unplug the device, it fairly quickly (but not too quickly) reduces the battery percentage to something closer to it's actual value. It's usually not so fast that you notice it, but sometimes when you unplug the device, you'll see it half an hour later at 90%, while other times it will be at 98% after the same time. This is sometimes because the battery may not have been fully charged when you unplugged it, even though it said 100%. Which is all a long way of saying, the same thing happens at the low end also. As the battery gets low, the device might start showing a percentage lower than what actually remains as a subtle hint to you that you should plug it in. But when it comes right down to it, the device will stay on as long as it can (possibly using a low power mode) once the battery is really truly about to die. This means a device might show 2% when the actual amount left is 7%. It'll show 1% when there's still 6%, but as it drops to 5%, the display doesn't go to 0%, then -1%. It just keeps showing 1% as long as there is some battery charge left, until it honestly truly runs out of charge and dies.",
"Your phone doesn't really know exactly how much charge is left in the battery. The percent it reports is a sort of \"worst-case scenario\". Also, phone OSs typically go into battery-saving mode once they reach a certain percent."
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6jrr1e | How come some GIFs need a "GIFV" link to be viewed, while others work without even a click? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Traditional gifs are fundamentally images. The format was not designed for video. It was always an image format, but with the option of having a short series of images to make a little animation. But then people starting using gifs for much more than they were designed for. People started using them for videos. This is really inefficient because each frame is stored as a separate image, where as proper video formats tend to store each frame as a difference from the last one. This means gifs of only a few seconds long can be huge, and take ages to download. Despite the drawbacks, people liked the convenience of gifs because they can play in any browser and can be easily embedded into websites, comments, etc. The idea behind gifv is to keep the convenience of a gif, but using an actual video format. Gifv is not actually a specific format, it's just a filename used to inform you that it's a video that's intended to be looped like a gif. A gifv is actually a WebM or MP4 video file. Gifv is so much better because it can make files over 10 times smaller. Most sites have ability to render images from links, however they don't render videos or can't for various reasons. That is why you can see GIF where ever you can see pictures, but not GIFV and also that is why GIFV is smoother,",
"I'm no expert, but here's my basic understanding of it: GIFs are basically a bunch of images lined up and played in order like a flip book. This can make really long GIFs massive in size, which would take ages to load since they have to save every single frame. GIFV on the other hand is more like an MP4, where it's one image and the next frames are just instructions on what changes. So instead of storing the whole image, if the background of trees is always the same, you can get rid of it basically when saving the files."
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6jsah9 | where do datacenters back up to? | Most companies back up to the cloud these days, which is a server in some datacenter. I am wondering: where do datacenters send their own back ups to? Do they use some off-site storage? Do they back up to different centers, maybe to some center not related to their own organization? Starts to sound like inception, but really curious how this works. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First, \"datacenter\" doesn't really mean much in this context. A datacenter might host servers for hundreds of companies, and it's *the individual company's responsibility* to back up their data, **not** the datacenter. Hell, most companies would be mad as hell if anyone else touched their data, including for making backups! Unless you're selling data storage, that is. In that case, you can use many different strategies. Yes, you'll have geographical redundancies, and distribute the data among different datacenters in different geographical locations. You'll also have data integrity products (similar to RAID arrays). And you'll make hardcopy backups, and save them somewhere off-site. Possibly multiple places off-site."
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6jt4zs | What does the 'Renew Lease' button in the wifi setting on Apple devices do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you connect to a wi-fi network(in most configurations) you are given an IP address to use. This IP address is passed out by a protocol called the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol(DHCP). When DHCP gives you an address, it lets you, and **only** you, have that address for a defined period of time. This is your lease. At the end of your lease most clients will automatically renew the lease so you keep service. The \"Renew Lease\" button makes that happen at a time of your choosing instead of automatically. This is often done if you want to guarantee your IP won't change for a while, or if you're having connectivity problems and want to make sure you're up-to-date.",
"When a device connects to a network, the address the device is given is temporary. The network host can be configured to have this lease be short or long. Renew lease tells the device to ask the network host to extend the lease time.",
"When you connect to a wireless network there's a DHCP server also running (generally; not always). DHCP is \"dynamic host configuration protocol\". A DHCP server provides your device with an IP (Internet Protocol) address so that it can communicate on the local network. This address, when assigned, comes with a duration. I've seen everything from a day to a week. When that duration expires, your device again queries the DHCP server and receives either the same address (typically) or a new address. The Renew Lease button forces that requerying of the DHCP server, renewing your lease of the IP from the DHCP server. It's useful for when the server which provided you with the original IP address reboots and loses track of which IPs have been assigned -- it can do away with \"duplicate IP errors\" on the local network."
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6jtmho | Why Facebook may finally have to compromise its user experience in order to keep growing | Was hoping someone could help explain this article from recode for me. Really interesting stuff just a bit over my head. URL_0 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So Facebook has grown (in terms of money) up until now by signing up rich westerners. Because more rich westerners kept signing up, companies kept paying more for ads, and Facebook kept making more money. But now, they've pretty much signed up most of the rich westerners that are going to sign up. Sure, people will age in, and people will die, but it's not like there's another billion middle class people running around. Instead, they're signing up people in the developing world, which is great for them, but they don't have a ton of money to spend, and firms don't really want to pay a lot to advertise to them. So in order to keep charging more for advertising, they're going to have to come up with new kinds of ads. These ads will likely be more intrusive than the current kind. That's going to disrupt the Facebook user experience (think autoplaying ads with sound) that will inevitably make a lot of people angry.",
"They get money from advertising unobtrusively (relevant to your timeline / interests). Investers demand more money. Facebook must start advertising obnoxiously and unrelated to your interests to get more money"
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6jto9o | How is underclocking sometimes a solution to avoiding black screens and the PC freezing? | I understand the concept of overclocking (thanks to ELI5) now, but I recently came across a laptop freezing problem where people suggested to underclock the RAM and GPU, and the freezing problem was gone - although no one bothered to explain why it solves it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sometimes a computer might have issues running at stock clocks if its been abused or is old. Sometimes its heat related. Lower clock speeds are easier for chips to run at, and if the voltages adjust automatically, lower clocks will also use less voltage to operate (decreasing temps)"
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6jtthu | Why do hackers hack things like youtube / Instagram / twitter ect accounts and do nothing but use it to promote themselves or their hacking group? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ethical hacking is definitely a thing, although 'ethical' is used loosely. Some of these hackers run a business that helps other businesses find security flaws in their network and application. Except too often, this hacking is done before anyone agrees to the service. They'll hack a business, send them some sample data they extracted, and say \"Look what I did. Pay me $100k to find out how I did it and how to stop it.\"",
"Depends on the hacker. Some groups are looking to promote themselves because they sell their knowledge/tools/exploits on the web. Others might be in it for their ego/entertainment. Some might hold a grudge. Edit: example, I believe the group that normally gets noticed for occasionally DDOSing (distributed denial of service) the PlayStation Network is actually advertising their DDOS tool/service to other hackers when they do so."
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6juv68 | How does a virus like "Petya" lock a computer so that it can't just simply be deleted, and how do the makers receive the ransom money without their identities being disclosed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> how does a virus like \"Petya\" lock a computer so that it can't just simply be deleted The software takes everything on the hard-drive and encrypts it. Everything, including OS that gets loaded at bootup. So when it reboots, instead of grabbing the OS you expect it to grab, the virus have it load itself. Computers run and operate out of RAM, but that goes away when you turn it off. When a computer boots up, it's loading software from the hard-drive to RAM. (Which is why SSDs make bootup times faster). > and how do the makers receive the ransom money without their identities being disclosed? Typically bit-coin. With the right key to a bundle of bit-coins, they can sell that to other people for cash. Their \"bit-coin\" ID is forever stamped into the logs, but there's no real way to associate that ID with their real ID."
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6jvbxn | With things like fingerprint scanners on everyday things such as phones, is there anything holding them back from being applied to guns and other dangerous items? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"three things: 1. No gun manufacturer wants to be the first to sell a \"secure\" gun. The tech has been around for years - cheap RFID tech in a ring needing proximity, fingerprint readers in the grip, gun-key systems built into the triggers, this tech isn't new. It's also not foolproof, and the first lawsuit where these security systems fail, and the gun that shouldn't have been able to fire fires and lethally wounds someone, will be catastrophic for the manufacturer. Nobody wants to be the first. 2. Fingerprint readers aren't good security. Modern fingerprint readers are easily fooled, they aren't FAST ( No cop or soldier wants to wait for his gun to unlock while someone else's bullets are already flying), and they lead to an uncomfortable problem - I can fire your gun if i just cut off your finger. Fingerprints make better username replacements than password or key replacements. 3. The NRA in the US is actively campaigning against these types of security measures, for the above reasons and more, and they are a very powerful lobbying body with a lot of political pull.",
"Yes, a gun with a fingerprint scanner is going to be more dangerous to the person who needs their life saved by it than the person trying to kill them. Nobody is going to buy that. It complicates firearms and increases the odds of failure significantly. I can barely get in the back door with my fingerprint at the office and my iPhone 7 Plus fails 3-4 times sometimes. I like my guns to go bang when I pull the trigger as opposed to \"beep beep\". A fingerprint scanner would require a much more exact grip, perfect finger placement, a battery that could easily die, a good reader that fails as rarely as possible, good electronics that can survive the constant firing of the gun, a ton of training on that specific weapon, and enough people dumb enough to think that adding all this stuff is going to make it safer for them to justify the R & D and production. Basically, it makes the gun more dangerous for the wrong people. I would never bet my life on something that required a fingerprint scanner. I can't even eat a chicken nugget and open my phone without a pass code.",
"They sell them. No one buys them. #1) issue is that it's slow. If you need a gun you need it *RIGHT THEN*, not after pressing your fingerprint to a sensor for 2 seconds. Especially if you aren't a cop you can't just pull out your gun until you really need it - and cops refuse to use them for the same reason. #2) It requires electricity, a battery, a charger, ect. You won't need your gun every day, like you'll need your phone. So you will probably forget to charge it regularly, or replace the batteries after they go bad in 3 years. Then someone breaks down your door and you need your gun but it's not charged...so sad. Same issue with keeping guns/ammo in safes. If a gun is in a safe or unloaded it's completely useless for anything you'd want a handgun for. Unless you want to go on a killing spree, in which case the safe or a fingerprint sensor wouldn't matter either.",
"Battery - Think about how often your phone is almost dead. A firearm would most likely get less attention than your phone and you would not charge it often. Then if you \"need\" it, the battery might be dead and therefore useless. Cops or military would do better, but I would not want my life to depend on my battery level. Fingerprint scanners - How many times have you had to try and open your iPhone and the fingerprint scanner not work? I'd not want to bet my life on that tech. RFID 'rings' - OK, read battery again. Now do you wear a watch or ring to bed? I don't. If someone breaks into the house in the middle of the night, I'd have to find my ring or watch, hope that both the ring or watch is still charged, hope the gun is still charged and then put the ring or watch on. Also, if there were a ring of watch RFID..... You could just look at my hand to know if I had a firearm on me. The tech just does not work well. Again think of your phone. But also the firearm has a good bit of shock each time it fires. Plus criminals are not going to buy these types of weapons. And criminals will be able to circumvent the safety system."
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6jw33w | how come software companies have to wait for hackers to find weaknesses in their system and not just figure it out themselves before rolling out a software package? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Try to think about all the ways you could break into your home if you were a burglar. You get a bit of an advantage because you live there and know the layout. Now, ask 1 million burglars how they would break into your home. I guarantee they will find at least one way that you don't. All the internal testing in the world will never be as comprehensive as a huge number of people in your system finding things accidentally (or not accidentally).",
"There's an old story about a programmer that found the most obvious bugs in his software, then passed it over to his beta-tester. Part of the game took place in a cafeteria, and the programmer had written a 'red herring' into the game: the player could take a napkin from the dispenser on the table, but the napkin had absolutely no use anywhere in the game. The tester submitted a bug report that said, 'Game crashes when taking more than 999 napkins from the dispenser in the cafeteria'. The tester had done something that apparently serves no purpose; since it was a text-only game, that meant that the tester had sat at his keyboard and typed 'get napkin from dispenser' 999 times in a row, for no real reason. The programmer later said, 'I hadn't bothered to test the dispenser, because it never occurred to me that someone might actually attempt to take a thousand completely useless objects.'",
"Software companies find 1001 vulnerabilities and close them before anyone knows about them. Most before its ever released. But ultimately developers are people and people don't always see everything, especially when it comes to their own works. So hackers find the 1002nd vulnerability and exploit it. Good developers never stop looking for those holes in their software but you can't expect them to think of every scenario. There are far more hackers than any one developer group has developers so it only makes sense that they can sometimes find holes before the developers can.",
"There is a more fundamental problem than others have mentioned. If my business goes offline because Windows had a bug that allowed a hacker to shut me down, I suffer damage, but Microsoft does not. Economically, the people who buy the software are the ones who have the incentive to make it hack-proof, but they have no ability to do so. The developers, who get to choose how much time and effort they spend making their software hack-proof, have very little incentive to do so. Until at least some of the economic harm caused by hackers falls on the companies who write the hacked software, they will always under invest in making their software bullet-proof. I am *not* saying they put no effort in, but ask any senior person in any software QA group in any company, and they will tell you that QA is underfunded in their company.",
"Let me rephrase the question: How come hay distributors have to wait for professional needle hunters to find the needles in their haystacks instead of just finding the needles themselves before shipping the hay? Hopefully that puts the scope of the problem in the correct frame of reference. Hay distributors are not trained to find needles, and don't need to be, as 99.98% of all hay has no needles in it. Of course, looking at it the other way, ALL software has bugs in it; there are more possible logic paths that can be taken than a software developer can test for before publishing. If they followed all logical paths and accounted for them, it would be faster and cheaper to do the task manually than to use computer software. So developers pick some arbitrary point in testing as \"good enough\" and some set up a bug bounty reporting system for post-publish discovery.",
"While everyone else here is going to give you broad answers, the difficulty involved, and much with the uttering of statistics and the doing of things, etc. The truth is more complicated. This is not a problem with security not being given due attention per-se, but rather a consequence of our field's lack of practicing good engineering. Let me explain from an example in a different field: Construction. On 9/11 two planes much larger than the engineers had ever foreseen crashed into them. Despite an event that critically wounded the tower, it remained upright for about half an hour. But they overbuilt the towers, they stayed up long enough for many to escape. The lessons learned from that collapse are now considered in future designs -- many planned skyscraper builds went back to the drawing board after, to be redesigned to account for this. Some of the very first laws in human history detail building codes -- \"If a builder buildeth a house, and it collapses and kills its owner, the builder shall be put to death.\" All of our buildings are built upon the knowledge of previous failures. Their designs are open to public inspection. There are libraries upon libraries filled with analysis and standards. All work (should) be inspected, and engineers cross-check with each other at every step of the design process, and even during construction. The towers stayed up as long as they did because humanity has had over 8,000 years of engineers learning how to build better buildings, and all of the lessons they have learned, we can learn today. In my field... none of this happens. Designs are black boxed, considered trademarked, trade secrets, copyrighted, patented -- the point is, most of our technology is most certainly not available for public inspection. Consequently, when it fails we learn nothing. So why not? Because corporations don't want to admit to wrongdoing, so they blame esoteric reasons far removed from this truth. And so our community learns nothing about the failure, cannot conduct a root cause analysis, and cannot share this information with anyone so our mistakes are learned from. Worse, we have to redesign things from scratch most usually every time. Our software isn't modular (like buildings are). We rarely incorporate well-tested previous designs. In fact, the industry is actively averse to using a proven design because by the time its proven, it's considered \"out of date\". Put another way: We reinvent the wheel with every new model of car. Because of all of these things, a person in our field, no matter how gifted, can only rise to the level of their own competence. They have no shoulders to stand on, and, being human, and unable to communicate with very many other humans for the aforementioned reasons, there are inevitably mistakes. This is why \"hackers\" will win in every contest. Security is only as strong as the weakest link, and with all of these problems, it's almost a statistical certainty they will find not just one, but very many. The problem isn't that companies design badly, or that they didn't invest enough in security. The problem is that no matter how much of an effort you make... it's *your* effort only, not the collective efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. And so we are left with things like cell phones that can catch fire and kill us. We're left with hospitals all over Europe right now that aren't functional because of a \"cyber attack\". Everything that has a microprocessor in it has bugs. And as our society becomes increasingly dependent on information systems, this problem will only increase exponentially. We don't need 8,000 years to fix these problems. Aviation is a relatively new field -- we only started a hundred years ago, and yet thanks to proper engineering *practice*, by applying first principles, it is now the safest way to fly. But until we start applying those principles, our technology will continue to with increasing frequency and severity. Security is defined properly as \"the computer doing what you want it to do, and not doing what you don't want it to do.\" Whether it's a hacker or an \"oops\" -- the end result is the same. And proper engineering would prevent both.",
"There is a job called 'Pentester', i think, who are hackers for a job and on a legal base. They get hired by companies to test their networks and softwares for weaknesses. I hope i could answer your question ^^",
"You write a program You write it 99% bug free, there are 1% issues now. You have peer reviews when you're checking it in, they catch 99% of issues, you're now at 0.01% issues. Your QA team checks it over and Pentesters try to break it, they find some other bugs and remove 99% of the remaining issues. Your code is now 99.9999% bug free. Yay! You release it into the wild. If it is only somewhat popular and doesn't contain anything really valuable maybe no one every finds the bugs If its really popular or contains/protects/operates something really valuable you're now a huge target. There are now hundreds or thousands of software engineers pouring over your code trying to find a breach. It is possible for there to be 10-1000x as many people searching for a breach once its out in the wild as touched it when it was in production. You have way more eyes looking at it from so many different perspectives that someone will find something. No code is 100% bug free, and its not possible to ensure that it is. Sometimes built in functions provided by Windows or core HTTP functionality gets broken and there is nothing you can do to stop that. Security is about the most effective protection for the most reasonable cost. If you are a small software developer you will never successfully defend against a nationstate attacker so if Russia wants to breach your system they're getting in so you just focus on making it fairly secure so the average script kiddy isn't going to get through"
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6jwnoc | Stupidly, I replied to a text near a petrol bowser & was embarrassingly told off over the PA system to "GET OFF YOUR PHONE", in front of everybody. What're the actual concerns for using phones at service stations? (And how stupid was I?) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's an urban myth that mobile phones can ignite gasoline vapor (it's actually static electricity, which doesn't come from a phone). It's complete bunk, and they're parroting misinformation. Just keep a good ole \"fuck you\" chambered when they say nonsense like that.",
"As far as using a cell phone at a gas station and having it start a fire, that's been well proven as a myth. The biggest problem with someone using a cell phone at a gas station is operator inattention. Walking into traffic, forgetting to remove the gas nozzle from the car before driving off, not paying attention to any possible equipment malfunction such as the gas nozzle auto-shutoff not working.",
"Don't feel too stupid. As a former gas jockey I can tell you that there are still people who have to be reminded not to smoke while filling up."
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6jzd0d | With all the talk about electric cars releasing more Co2 than a regular gas car. What part of the production process of the carbatteries release so much Co2? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly the mining and refinement of the metals - nickel or lithium depending on the type of battery, along with decent amounts of copper and rare earth metals for the motors. That up-front carbon cost might be cancelled out by reduced emissions over the life of the vehicle, and recycling of those expensive metals after that to make another one."
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6jzihw | Why is computer memory always multiples of 2? | firstly, yes i know its already been kind of answered [here]( URL_0 ) but im looking for a more in-depth answer. In the post linked above some people have said that its in multiples of 2 and it has something to do with binary and maths. But no one says in in a way i understand, one redditor did make a comment about this but he/she started talking about fingers and drawing on fingers and i just got even more confused. Also, why are there not 2 or 4 bit stuff? why does it start with 8 bit? (If its me being dumb and just never hearing of 2 or 4 bit stuff just tell me) Why is the most popular bit stuff in 32 or 64 bit? Why is the highest bit i've heard of 64 bit? Wouldn't the more bits it has the better? Is this a hardware limitation? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"binary works like light switches. Each data channel is on or off. 0 or 1. so with 2 channels you can count 4 positions. 00=0 01=1 10=2 11=3 Each data channel you add doubles the potential number of states you can count to 000=0 001=1 010=2 011=3 100=4 101=5 110=6 111=7 0000=0 0001=1 0010=2 0011=3 0100=4 0101=5 0110=6 0111=7 1000=8 1001=9 1010=10 1011=11 1100=12 1101=13 1110=14 1111=15 and so on and so on. 2 bit is fairly useless 4 bit was common in early systems of the 50s and 60s The earliest home/business computers were 8 bit Over time we have gotten more and more sophisticated in our processors and computer languages. 32bit was the prominent number through the turn of the century which comprised most of peoples experience with computers. Advances lead us to 64bit implementation recently....and in due time we will jump to 128, 258, 1026, 2048....and beyond. The limitation comes from multiple avenues... 1. hardware takes time to develop and advance 2. legacy support of older software 3. PROFIT its expensive to develop new more powerful CPUs and operating systems...and you have to earn a profit off your work before moving forward 4. NECESSITY....You dont build the control for your toaster with a supercomputer if a simple thermistor does the trick...and you dont put an 8 core 64bit processor in a furby if an 8 bit single core microcontroller gets the job done. The growth and complexity of our systems follows a pseudo organic model....evolving as the need arises.",
"There's a key thing here which I don't think anyone has mentioned: memory addressing. As a program runs, it often needs to store things in memory, obviously. But in addition to storing things, it also needs a way to keep track of the things that it's stored. E.g., you may have written a bunch of data somewhere in memory, but that's pretty useless unless you plan on going back at some point and reading what you wrote, or modifying it further. In order to do that, you need to be able to talk about *where* you stored all that data. The memory of a computer is broken up into chunks of 8 bits (called bytes), and each chunk/byte is given an ID number. The first 8 bits are byte number 1, the second 8 are byte number 2, etc. If, for example, you had 4 gigabytes of memory in your computer, that's actually 4,294,967,296 individual bytes, which means on a system with 4 gigabytes of memory, the ID numbers for bytes would go all the way up to 4,294,967,296. Now, let's say you stored a bunch of data somewhere in memory. So, e.g., you'd say \"Hey, memory, give me a bunch of space to store some data\". And the memory would reply \"Okay, here's some space starting at byte number 623,163,498\". Later, wen you want to read back the data, you'd say \"Hey, memory, what's the data stored starting at byte number 623,163,498?\" There's actually a physical thing on your computer that your processor talks to when it's dealing with memory, and there's actual physical wires that go between your processor and the memory. So the wires that go between the processor and the memory need to be able to carry the ID numbers for the bytes. Well, it turns out, the more wires you have, the larger ID numbers you can handle. E.g., if you had only two wires, and each wire could either carry electricity or not, then there's only 4 possible numbers you can represent (both wires off, left wire on and right wire off, left wire off and right wire on, both wires on). So with only 4 possible ID numbers, you would only be able to handle 4 bytes of memory! Even though you have a whole 4 gigabytes available, it doesn't matter, because you can't actually talk about any of the bytes past the first four. When people say a computer is 32-bit, what this really means is that there are 32 wires that connect the CPU to the memory. Which means the number of IDs that can be communicated is 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 (which, you'll notice, is exactly the number of bytes in 4 gigabytes). So a 32 bit computer can handle having 4 gigabytes of memory. But, it can't go higher than that. If you had 8 gigabytes of memory, you could only \"talk about\" the first half of it on a 32-bit computer. You'd need a 64-bit computer, where there are 64 wires between the CPU and the memory, to talk about the ID numbers for the full 8 gigabytes.",
"Modern computer memory is conceptually addressed as bytes, but the real hardware transfer is done in a multiple (a power of 2) of bytes. To do this, the last few bits of the address do not take part in the actual transfer, but are (optionally) used inside the CPU to select one (or more) of the transferred bytes. A consequence of this scheme is that what is transferred is a block of bytes (the size is a power of 2) that is aligned at a multiple of the block size. If the CPU wants a data block that does not fit this constraint, more than one block read is needed, and the CPU must reshuffle the content of the blocks to get the data it needs. A CPU can do without such reshuffling hardware (and the associated loss of time) by requiring that data is suitably aligned. In short: 2^N alignment matches what is easy and fast in hardware."
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6jzkij | Why is it that a company like Apple can take iPhone preorders in advance and fulfill them over time, but a company like Nintendo will frequently sell out of new products and leave customers at the mercy of pre-ordering and over-priced second hand sellers? | I've never had a problem getting a new iPhone, but I've never seen a Switch in the wild. I have 0 expectations of getting an SNES mini. I remember brawling customers in Target to get a Wii way back when. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djir91j"
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"text": [
"Honestly, I think it's more attributable to poor decision making rather than outright malice as a lot of people will suggest. Remember that Nintendo has a hit or miss history with its gaming consoles. The N64 sold great (33M units), but the GameCube did relatively poorly (24M units, PS2 had 153M). They actually stopped production for a time in 2003 to reduce surplus stock! The Wii took everyone by surprise, selling more units in the first few months than PS3 and Xbox 360 combined (finishing with 101M units). Then came the WiiU, with a measly 13.6M units. To give some perspective, in the first two months after launch, the Wii sold 435K units, while the WiiU sold 57K units in the US. Apple, especially in the latter years of Job's life, knew it can slap its logo on a turd and make it the must have accessory of the year, and to be fair, they tend to deliver what people want. Nintendo doesn't have a comparably sized cult following. Sure you'll find people who buy anything Nintendo just cuz, but for the most part they have to convince gamers to buy their gear, and they're REALLY bad at it. They make bad design decisions (lots of gimmicks no one actually likes), and they get lucky once in a while. The Wii sold well because it appealed to a completely ignored segment of the market: non gamers and casual gamers. The switch is popular right now because it's the new toy and Zelda, but it remains to be seen whether that will translate into a hit, or quickly die off a la WiiU. I think Nintendo is unwilling to risk getting stuck with a bunch of surplus stock. They could build massive production capacity, and ensure anyone who wants one can get one, but who knows how many people will actually want one a year down the line. You don't want to set up a bunch of factories only to shut them down in six months when the novelty wears off. And you also don't want to delay the release too much while you build up stock, cuz then people will lose interest and start calling it vaporeare. They know they're tossing a dart in the dark as to whether the console will be popular (will the convertible gimmick pay off?), they don't want to risk losing a bunch of money by shutting down extra manufacturing capacity if the system is a flop, and perhaps a little bit of a desire to make the console seem more successful by selling out (though I don't think this is the main motivator as others suggest). TL;DR: Nintendo gambles on gimmicks, never knows whether their consoles will be a hit of a flop, and doesn't want to risk losing money on surplus capacity and stock, so they play it \"safe\"."
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6k1ak6 | How does youtube meet the incredibly high demand for storage required for all the uploaded videos? | I read that if you tried to watch every video on youtube, for every minute of video you watched, you would fall one week behind due to all the uploads that would take place in that one minute. So this raised the question - how does youtube (or Google) meet such an incredible demand for storage? Are there algorithms that make video storage size smaller? And even if such algorithms existed, wouldn't there still be an absolutely atrocious amount of data that would need to be stored? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djikyge"
],
"text": [
"By having entire buildings filled with servers and hard drives. How many terabyte drives can you fit in a million sq ft datacenter? Google has over 20 datacenter worldwide. And you continuously add more drives. By the rackful."
],
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15
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6k1j8x | why even If I am on a 60 Hz monitor, 100 fps feels smoother than 60fps | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djiumwa",
"djitdxx",
"djivdfk"
],
"text": [
"A 60 Hz monitor puts frames out every 16.6 ms (milliseconds). 60 FPS is just an average, you had 60 frames come out in that second. These frames don't necessarily match up well time wise with when the monitor outputs its frames. Usually a 100FPS output will have fewer frames that are really far from when the monitor puts out one of its frames.",
"There's a decent explanation here: URL_0 Imagine if your computer was generating frames at thousands of FPS, when the monitor renders a frame, it's going to have been generated very recently. If the frames are only generated at 60fps, then the most recent frame could have been generated anywhere from 0 - 16ms ago. If you're at 59fps, then occasionally you might even see the same frame twice in a row.",
"Because they aren't synchronized. If your computer was putting out a frame and your monitor was displaying that frame at a rate of 60 per second that would be the smoothest. However, your computer is generating frames and your monitor is refreshing at different intervals. Thus higher frame-rates ensure that the frame the monitor is displaying is as near to new as possible."
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6k2exl | why is internet explorer so much slower than the other browsers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djiutr2",
"djisugv"
],
"text": [
"I will agree with /r/moujaune on many points, but expound on others. 1. Microsoft has never focused on excellence in design, especially in their early history. Most of their products were \"good enough\" but they never really invested in producing \"the best\". Instead, through aggressive marketing and morally reprehensible (but technically legal) means they would pound competitors out of the market: Netscape is a famous example, but also Lotus, WordPerfect, etc. 2. Microsoft also ignored standards as they were created around the web. Their early versions of IE were buggy and broken as far as most standards were concerned, and they were very slow to change this. Why would they do this? Presumably because they thought if they had an MS-only compatible version of things, you'd have to use their products for convenience's sake. In response, web designers usually created pages that were for IE only, just to support their non-conformist designs. 3. One place where Microsoft has been very good at is: backwards compatibility. They do this by keeping decision points in their code that detects old formats or scenarios (such as Word 1.0 documents) and then they jump to use the old code appropriately. This is why you can still run many if not most DOS programs on Windows today. However, this leads to extra code being maintained and compiled into their products, including all their crappy non-conformist versions. This extra code also means slower load times, slower run times, and slower render times for IE. 4. So Microsoft (as I understand it) made a break with the Edge browser. It gets rid of a lot of that legacy stuff and uses a new rendering engine that is focused on standards and competitor pain-points like rendering times and power usage. In other words, they have been dragged kicking and screaming into making something modern, because they realized and finally responded to the market that was kicking their ass. If it sounds like I am anti-Microsoft, I mostly am. Their history is full of anti-consumer and anti-nice behaviors and sentiment, like the \"IE can't be removed from the operating system!\" crap. However, under their current CEO they have realized they can't control the market any more and instead it has gone around them to leave them behind. They now have many more very good and market-driven products like Surface tablet/notebooks and Windows 10, and are actually trying to innovate and move away from the upgrade treadmill model of revenue. The Edge browser is a direct result of that new mindset. When they move away from the \"me too!\" approach of their product development, like Bing and Zune and MSN, and stop trying to lock people into their stuff, I'll give them more kudos then too. *Edit: clarification, correction*",
"It's not as true as it once was since they revamped it and rebranded it as Microsoft Edge, who some people kind of like now. Still, it used to be slower since it was of older design. The original Internet Explorer was released in 1995, whereas more modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome were released in 2004 and 2008 respectively. While I'm sure that Internet Explorer's code was revamped many times, it's now \"ancient\" origins effectively meant that new browser features (complex image formats, videos, flash, more recent versions of HTML, etc.) were mostly only tacked on the already existing code, whereas browsers like Firefox and Chrome had them integrated (and most importantly, optimized) from the start. [A lot has changed since the birth of the web, and many browsers were less lucky than IE and kicked the bucked along the road]( URL_0 ); in a way it's a surprise IE (in its rebranded form) is still kickin'."
],
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12
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|
6k3bhj | How does the measuring of electricity work? | I understand that voltage=total power output and watts=electricity "pressure". Why are some electrical systems much more dangerous than others? For example you can safely (or with minimal repercussions) touch the positive and negative terminals on a DC vehicle battery, but not for an AC power outlet in your home? Which matters more, the voltage, the wattage, or the amps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djizng4"
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"text": [
"Voltage is the electric potential. Thats more like the pressure than anything else. Voltage hurts but doesn't really harm you. This is because our nerves are quite literally run with electricity. Amps is the current, the speed of flow of electricity. A small current into your heart will kill you, but you need a good amount of voltage to get there, and be unlucky to have that be the path of least resistance. Watts is the power, the current multiplied by the voltage. No pressure in high speed is no power. Tons of pressure with no movement is no power. Lots of pressure and lots of speed is high power. An electrical component typically has a voltage and current requirement to turn on. The adapter (wall plug part) of a typical usb phone charger will set the voltage and allow for up to an amount of current to flow in. A wall outlet is 120v ac in the us. The current is very high but depends on what you plug into it. A dc battery has MUCH less power because the current and voltage are nowhere near what the wall outlet can allow. What matters most if you can feel electricity is the voltage. 120v outlets can be felt very easily. 9v battery, not so much. However the voltage doesn't matter if the resistance of the connecto pulls the current down too much. Rubber gloves have an insanely high resistance, so basically no current can flow causing little power to be provided. I am not exactly an expert but I have an engineering degree if you have any questions."
],
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6k4q9b | Why is it that something that is animated (i.e movie, cartoon, anime), can have different resolution options eventhough it was drawn using computer software rather than shot using a camera? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djjkasv",
"djjla6p"
],
"text": [
"Because resolution is the amount of pixels on the screen. Just like movies are shot in 4K, cartoons can be drawn in 4K. The rest is the same. The programs that generate lower resolutions don't differentiate between what the pixels mean, a movie and a cartoon are the same thing to it.",
"There are ways to increase resolution of any image or movie. The easiest way to do this is to duplicate pixels, so duplicate everything lengthwise then heightwise. And you get a higher resolution image. It will probably look bad but hey it is higher res. There are better ways to increase resolution too but they are all about duplicating pixels at some level. Infact your TV does this for you when it gets lower res input. 4k TVs will translate HDTV into 4k. HDTVs will translate SDTV into HDTV. 120fps screens will make 60fps input into 120fps. Another way to have different resolutions is to have the cartoon dawn as a \"vector image\". Vector images are math equations that define where lines exist and thus can be rendered in any resolution we want."
],
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3
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6k562v | Why does the thread count of sheets make them softer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djjfutz"
],
"text": [
"Think of sandpaper... the kind with large grit is rougher than the sandpaper with fine grit. Not imagine the same thing with threads. Fewer, larger threads will be rougher than more fine threads."
],
"score": [
3
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|
6k5vvd | Considering how hard disk drives are built, how can they perform multiple write actions at the same time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djjkre1"
],
"text": [
"They can't. They just interleave bits of each write operation really quickly. Remember that hard drives spin very fast, and the read/write head is super quick. See [this video]( URL_0 ) to see what it would look like to write two files at once."
],
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6k6b6h | What makes Tesla cars special compared to other full electric cars? | Nissan has the Leaf, Chevy has the Bolt. Just googling [electric cars]( URL_0 ) brings up a list of them with some prices going lower than the Tesla Model 3. With all of that said, why can't these other companies generate as much demand or popularity for their electric cars as Tesla does? What makes Tesla special? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djjnt6f",
"djjpgfx"
],
"text": [
"Mostly it is range per charge. The eGolf and Leaf have around 80-90miles per charge. The Model3 is like 200 miles. Tesla also has the halo product.",
"Tesla is (relative to the history and volume) of other car manufactures, small. Tesla's auto division is focused on one thing, electric cars. They don't make anything else. GM/Toyota/Nissan, their bread and butter for 100 years has been cars/trucks/etc. Companies that big and that old don't change direction easily, nor are they quick to adopt new ways of thinking. Some of the other auto makers generally don't care about EV's (electric vehicles) GM is making an effort, but when I was buying my 2017 Volt, most dealerships tried to get me into a traditional car or truck. Electric cars are new, and for a large number of people \"new things are scary\" Tesla is the first company to take electric vehicles and make them \"sexy\" as Elon likes to say. Combine that with the best range in the whole market, insane performance, and high tech luxury, it's a winning combo. I'm 1/2 in the electric market with my Gen2 Volt, max torque off the line and flying down the road in absolute silence is amazing. Very much looking forward to getting into a Model 3 in 2019 hopefully."
],
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6k859b | Why are diesel engines so much louder than normal car engines? | I have cars drive by my house all the time and it is never a problem but when a diesel truck or delivery van go by I can barely hear anything else. Why is that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djk0k59"
],
"text": [
"There are several reasons a diesel is louder. The first is the blowdown event, this is the moment the exhaust valve opens. Diesel engines run at much higher pressures than gasoline, so there's going to be a louder noise as exhaust gasses escape through the port. The prominent noise comes pressure variation in the cylinder during combustion. In olden time diesels, the fuel and air is compressed until spontaneous combustion. It basically ignites with a bang, combustion is rapid, and further that pressure wave then slams into the cylinder walls and piston. This form of combustion is called \"hard combustion\" and is responsible for most of the noise. Modern diesel engines use a 3 stage injection strategy to gradually increase pressure to reduce noise. In the premix phase, fuel is injected into the cylinder and compressed until ignition - hard combustion. In the diffusion phases, fuel is sprayed into the ignited cylinder, it looks like a flame thrower, and it gradually ramps up the pressure from there. Edit: There's other shit, but they're far less important, I think, to the conversation. But if you must know, port and exhaust geometry plays a role. Removing restrictions and bends in the path of exhaust gasses increase efficiency, which is good, but it also removes dampening effects of those restrictions along the path, which is bad - sound is capable of propagating further."
],
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12
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6k9nzb | How does a cryptocurrency design itself to be ASIC resistant? | What special programming needs to be done so that it can 'detect' that it's being mined by an ASIC or other specialised device, rather than a general compute device? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djkg9g9"
],
"text": [
"> What special programming needs to be done so that it can 'detect' that it's being mined by an ASIC or other specialised device, rather than a general compute device? A cryptocurrency that's been designed to be hard to mine on an ASIC doesn't have a specification that says \"if running on an ASIC, go slower\", such a thing isn't really possible because a computing device can always pretend to be something else. The idea is to make the underlying algorithm hard to do. For example scrypt (used by litecoin) is hard because it requires a lot of memory to store values required for computations. On an ASIC, this means that memory will take up space instead of computational elements, making it slower. On the other hand, it is possible instead to compute these values on the fly, but if you have more computational elements instead of memory, they get used up to compute the values that would be stored in memory so you aren't gaining anything. Either way you go, what you gain is cancelled out by what you lose."
],
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3
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6kb992 | Why can't spaceships be fitted with a magnetic field generator to avoid solar radiation? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djkpi1c"
],
"text": [
"Generating a strong enough magnetic field to act as a shield has been discussed and theorized about for some time. However, as a practical matter, the power, size and weight requirements for using something like that on a spacecraft- and making it reliable enough for humans to use it safely- make it impossible with our current technology."
],
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3
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|
6kcl98 | My car radio just picked up an apparent telephone call - how the heck did that happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djl7mr7"
],
"text": [
"They make FM transmitters for cars that don't have AUX Jacks or bluetooth capability. Your car radio probably drove by one of those and it temporarily overrode your radio transmission. I've heard some of the *wierdest* music that way"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
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"url"
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|
6kcsg7 | What happens to batteries when they stop working? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djl30mw"
],
"text": [
"All electrochemical batteries work in more or less the same fashion. At each end of the battery is an electrically conductive electrode. Each electrode is in contact with a liquid electrolyte. Chemical reactions occur at either electrode involving the electrode material and the electrolyte. The reaction at one electrode releases an electron when it completes, and the reaction at the other electrode requires an electron to complete. When the electrodes are connected electrically, the flow of electrons from one electrode to another facilitates the chemical reactions occurring inside of the battery. When the chemical reactions can no longer continue due to a lack of electrolyte or electrode material, the battery is depleted."
],
"score": [
3
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|
6ke76z | Why do CFL bulbs turn on almost instantly, but tradition fluoro tubes still need to flicker on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djlo64l"
],
"text": [
"Good question. The design is basically identical to fluoro tubes: A tube containing a mercury vapour, with heated electrodes at both ends. The answer is that the technology has progressed from the old-fashioned switch-start, magnetically controlled systems, and has moved to electronic starting and control. Fluoro tubes equipped with a modern electronic start and control system, start very rapidly and don't flicker, and are also dimmable, etc. The difference is that in a tube system, the start and control system is in the light fitting. In a CFL, the tube and control system are integrated into a single replaceable unit. The result is that people with fluoros tend to keep the same light fitting, and just change the tube, so the old technology stays around longer. The traditional control system worked by routing power through a magnetic ballast - the job of the ballast is to limit the power available to the tube. While a filament bulb takes a fixed amount of power from the mains, a fluoro tube doesn't, and without some sort of system to throttle the power, it would explode due to overload. Fluoro tubes also have another problem, which is that they need a very high voltage to start - thousands of volts. So, if you just connected a tube to the mains, nothing would happen, because the tube needs a kick to start. To help with starting the tube electrodes are warmed up to red-heat in order to get the starting voltage down to a sensible level (about 1000 volts). So, there is a specific sequence to starting a fluoro tube: 1. Warm up tube electrodes 2. Generate high voltage pulse 3. Apply throttled power to tube 4. If tube is not active, go back to 1. Every time, a high voltage pulse is applied to the tube, the tube flashes. The magnetic system, is controlled by a very clever mechanical switch system, which is quite complex so I won't describe it here. However, the mechanical control of the magnetic system isn't able to give a consistent voltage pulse or a consistent electrode heat-up time. Sometimes, you get a small pulse, sometimes you get a large one. Sometimes, the electrodes are well heated, sometimes they're a bit cold. This means it often takes 2 or 3 attempts, before you get a good start. Because the system is mechanical, the timings are quite slow, so you see visible flashing, each time the system tries a start (and also the tube electrodes get a chance to cool down between attempts). With an electronic system, a microprocessor carefully controls the timing of the electrode heaters, and then triggers an electronic pulse generator which applies a very fast constant stream of pulses to the tube until it starts."
],
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5
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|
6keeqi | How do stoplights work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"djlh0wz"
],
"text": [
"They are either on a timer or they have magnetic sensors in the asphalt. In areas that don't get a large flow of regular traffic they are usually magnetic sensors so you don't have to sit and wait for a 2 minute light cycle. Lights with timers that are set properly can create that feeling of the lights changing as you approach if you are going the posted speed limit."
],
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5
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