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9qnrk2 | Why isn't there an ad blocker which still generates revenue for websites? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The entire reason that ad blockers work is because ads are generally stored on *other servers* because advertisers **don't trust websites not to cheat**. Without a trusted method of serving up ads, the online advertising market is worthless. Crafty advertisers will also constantly find ways to work around any rules the ad blocker tries to implement in order to differentiate between real contact and ads.",
"Not sure if it helps but you can check the [Brave browser]( URL_0 ), it includes an ad-blocker, a cookie shield and a system of revenue you can give to websites on a Chromium backbone",
"It is not like there is any way to settle this - advertisers pay money for ads to be seen by you. If you'll find a way to bypass it - no one will want to pay for bypassed ads. They will find a way to bypass your method of bypassing ads or just stop buying adds. It is a no-exit loop. Anyway, someone should somehow pay for good things you see in internet. It is either you or advertisers.",
"The *actual amount of money* advertising companies are *willing to pay* for ads does not depend on the number on clicks. It depends only on the number of sales those ads bring. Fake clicks don't increase the number of sales = > they won't increase the amount of money that enters the system = > they cannot increase payouts to websites (in aggregate). If fake clickers become more popular, the amount companies are willing to pay per click on ad will decrease. That will be the only effect. (Also, your ad blocker isn't really depriving websites of revenue. If they claim that, they are misguided. This is because many tests have already shown that you are a person who uses an ad blocker, you are also most likely a person who won't click on the ads anyway. Most of the large sites have already realized this, they tolerate ad blockers and focus their efforts elsewhere. These annoying messages are mostly shown by small sites.)",
"Advertisers don't keep spending money on ads if they don't have an effect. This will be good news, until 2 possible outcomes: * The site you're visiting doesn't make any money and needs to close because it doesn't cover its expenses. * advertisers figure out an other way to serve ads that bypass adblocks",
"What about an adblocker that still blocks ads but instead mines some cryptocurrency for the website?",
"Few advertisers pay to show the ad, most pay for clicks. If you hide the ads, nobody clicks them. nobody gets paid. if you have the blocker fake click them to generate money for the website, the website no longer needs visitors to make money, they can run a bunch of computers that click the ads on the site.this exists, but is fraud. ad networks (google) realize those clicks aren't real and pay no money for them.",
"Much like commercials, only it took us longer to solve for them, advertising needs to move into the realm of embedded within the content. Product placements"
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9qnu4s | How does real time traffic monitoring in google maps work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your phone constantly sends it's location data to Google. They pin point it on the map and gauge traffic congestion on his far you have moved since last upload. Type 'Google location history' into the internet and sign in to see a scary map of everywhere you have been.",
"It collects feedback from phones. All those privacy settings we ignore, gives them location, direction, and speed.",
"Google is actively gathering data always and also it's got statistics, which is just a fancy way to say \"using information from the past to predict what will happen next\". They measure how much time people spend on certain roads at certain times, how much time it takes for that road to clear (statistically and in real time), what are the busiest hours, what other roads people take... That's the kind of data they collect and analyze."
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9qnvkt | What's the difference between a wireless access point, a Wi-Fi extender and a bridge? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A wireless access point is the initial generation point of a wireless network, this can either be from a wifi enabled modem, or a wifi router. & #x200B; A wifi extender is a relay, that sends the data back to the access point, but often has a different ssid. Whereas a Mesh Network (which is another kind of extender) gives you the same ssid from every extender, meaning you don't have to change network. & #x200B; A wireless bridge connects two different wired ethernet connections together over a wireless connection. & #x200B; Some Wi-Fi extenders, such as those from tp-link can act in \\*all of these capacities\\*"
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9qonmn | How are songs burned to a CD? | I don’t understand how by dragging a file of a song onto the CD from a computer makes it possible to listen to it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Moving the file to the CD tell your computer that you want the file \"burned\" on to the disk. The process of burning is actually done by a laser. The laser writes the data to a thin metallic film inside the middle of the cd. If you flip a cd over and look at it carefully before you write the data the metallic film is all one color. After the cd has data written you will see the color has changed. I hope this helped.",
"The CD just stored digital data files, exactly the same as the hard disc in your computer. So at one level, all you're doing is copying the file from one disc to another. It would probably have to be converted, depending on what format it's stored in at the moment. There are many many different digital music file formats, but you can convert from one to another using an appropriate program. That would decode the music file then re-encode it in the format that is required by the CD. The CD also contains standard directories that allow the CD player to find the music files, and play them in the correct order. This is all defined by the \"CD Standard\", so the \"burning\" program would automatically create them as it stores the music files."
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9qpluz | Why are some batteries rechargeable and some not and if we can make batteries that can be recharged wouldn’t it be better to allow all these batteries to have this function? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It all depends on the chemical reaction that's used to generate the electricity. Rechargeable batteries sometimes deliver less power than the regular counterparts; the chemical reaction has to be reversible, so it's sometimes a \"weaker\" reaction than non-rechargeable batteries. Otherwise it's also a matter of cost."
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9qqblk | what's the difference between internet and www? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The internet is how computers across the world communicate. E-mail, file transfers and the world wide web are part of the internet. The World Wide Web (www) refers to webpages, what you see on your browser. But that's just a very large part of the internet, not the whole thing.",
"If you're in a city, the internet is all of the roads, houses, and buildings. The www is just the public-facing businesses.",
"* Internet is the network of computers. It allows you to view data on some computer somewhere else. * WWW (otherwise known as the World Wide Web) is just *one* of the services you can use on the internet. E-mail is another."
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9qqniw | How does a DNS server works? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, the domain name URL_0 translates to the addresses 93.184.216.34 (IPv4) and 2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946 (IPv6). Unlike a phone book, DNS can be quickly updated, allowing a service's location on the network to change without affecting the end users, who continue to use the same hostname. Users take advantage of this when they use meaningful Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and e-mail addresses without having to know how the computer actually locates the services. An important and ubiquitous function of DNS is its central role in distributed Internet services such as cloud services and content delivery networks.[4] When a user accesses a distributed Internet service using a URL, the domain name of the URL is translated to the IP address of a server that is proximal to the user. The key functionality of DNS exploited here is that different users can simultaneously receive different translations for the same domain name, a key point of divergence from a traditional phone-book view of the DNS. This process of using the DNS to assign proximal servers to users is key to providing faster and more reliable responses on the Internet and is widely used by most major Internet services."
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9qr2pg | Why aren't ads embedded in the site so ad blocker can't block it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If ads were hosted by the site, then the advertisers would have to trust the web site to be honest in how many and how often the ads were displayed or clicked. The advertisers would also not be able to collect information about each visitor like they do now.",
"Online advertising is very complex. The ads you see are put there by code that gives the advertising network information and then the network spends a few milliseconds auctioning that space to relevant brands and then the winner gets pushed to the site. That keeps the advertisement network in complete control."
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9qw1tc | Why is the binary system used in computers & How data is converted into signals? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You are asking two seemingly related questions but they are different. Starting with the question the question about why binary is used. Binary is used because there are only two options for the storage of data as bits. They are either on or off. When a bit is off it has a value of zero when on it has a value of 1. Bits are clustered together into larger collections until you get to a byte. Which is 8 bits and gives you 2 to the 8th power values. You may have heard of 8 bit music. The rest of your question has to do with meaning and how that meaning is complex.",
"I'll address the first part of your question. Modern computers use binary logic because it provides multiple advantages. Early electronic computers were analog. They could do some nifty stuff, but any slight crosstalk, thermal drift, etc. would cause the answer to not be accurate. If you use binary digital logic, then it takes a LOT of problems to mistake a 0 for a 1 (or vice versa). It's like the difference between a slide rule and an abacus, to reference two obsolete calculation systems. With a slide rule, you are constantly trying to get the slide in just the right place, and are often a little bit off. With an abacus, you either slide the bead or you don't. With binary digital logic, you can also implement things like error detection and error correction, so that even if there is a problem, it can be dealt with. These allow for very reliable and accurate computation. This is very important when you are building systems that are performing millions or billions of calculations per second. It is possible to use other discrete computational methods, such as trinary, or quaternary, or whatever. But that would add more circuit complexity than the benefit merits, and would vastly increase power consumption."
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9qyp4b | How do various ad blockers detect what an ad is and what's not? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Adblockers work off compiled blacklists of websites/ad providers and scan webpages for webpage elements that connect to them, if it sees it, it blocks the content from being loaded and/or shown.",
"Most ad blockers look at the source of the content. A website can go to other addresses to get the images and content that it shows. Let's say you want an image from \" URL_1 \". Most of the stuff that is shown is also from \" URL_1 \", so the ad blocker knows that it can be shown. Now let's say \" URL_1 \" tells your browser there is an image that is from \" URL_0 \" that should be shown on this page. The ad blocker knows that it isn't from the site that you went to, and that the \" URL_0 \" hosts a lot of ads. The ad blocker then tells the browser to show a different image instead."
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9qyz17 | how exactly does battery "give power" to a smartphone or laptop? What magic does electricity do to a battery? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A battery sort of burns some substance, very slowly, in a way that makes the energy come out in electricity, instead of heat. The basic idea is that you make the chemical reactions happen in two steps, one of which happens at one side, and the other happens at the other side. One reaction needs an electron, which is a particle that has an electric charge, and the other reaction releases an electron. This means that the first step pulls electrons from the first side, leaving it with a positive charge, and the second step releases electrons to the other side, making for a negative charge. And if you have too many electrons in one place, and not enough in another, then you can connect a circuit, like a light bulb or a phone, between the two places, and electrons will be forced through the circuit - and we call this electricity.",
"Power - electricity - electrical current is a flow of electrons along a wire. For electrons to flow, there needs to be a completed circuit - they need to be able to return where they started unless they were consumed by something along the way. In a battery, the start and end points of this circuit (cathode and anode, the + and - poles) are immersed in a special material that contains lots of ions. An ion is an atom with a non-neutral charge - usually an atom with an extra electron. Because it's unstable, the ion is very happy to let go of the extra electron. So there are all these extra electrons floating around in a charged battery, attracted to the cathode and repelled by the anode. When the circuit is completed (the device is switched on), the electrons start flowing out through the cathode, along the wires, and back into the battery through the anode. Because electricity is consumed by the device, fewer electrons come back than went out, and eventually the battery runs out of free electrons to send - so it's discharged. When a battery is being recharged, the external source of electricity sends a flow of fresh electrons in through the anode and out of the cathode. The ionic material in the battery captures all the extra electrons it can, and stores them for the future.",
"Battery dislocate ions from A to B to produce electricity. When you charge it the electricity moves back most of the ions from B to A, this is a cycle Rinse and repeat. When the ions can't move back the battery goes bad."
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9qz3t6 | How does a suppressor work on a gun? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[Here's a video]( URL_0 ) of a transparent plastic suppressor in slow motion, so you can see the action (2:20). The noise of a gun is caused by the high-pressure gases escaping out of the barrel as soon as the bullet exits; it's kinda like the bullet uncorks the gun and the gases \"pop\" like champagne. A suppressor adds some chambers to the process so the gases \"fizz\" out instead of \"popping\" out.",
"When guns fire, they produce superheated and pressurized gases. When the gases escape into the open, the dramatic change in environment causes the loud sound of a gun blast. So silencers work by making the transition more gradual for the gasses.",
"To reduce the \"BANG\" of a gunshot, you have two things you have to fight: 1. The explosive gasses 2. The supersonic crack of the bullet To reduce the sound of the explosion, the suppressor has a series of chambers that slow the expansion of the explosion. As the gasses hit each section, the gasses have to squeeze through restrictions then expand again on the other side... This takes the energy out of the explosion in steps. Imagine the difference in sound between popping a balloon with a pin and letting the air out slowly. Same volume of air is moved, just less violence. & #x200B; Now that still leaves the supersonic crack. Picture a whip, that crack is the tip of the whip breaking the sound barrier. So anything moving fast enough will create that crack. You can eliminate or reduce this by slowing the bullet down. Example, a 9MM round that has a 115 grain projectile with 6 grains of powder will send the bullet faster than the speed of sound. So you may reduce the sound of the explosion, but you still get the sharp crack. To avoid this, you would load a 9MM round with a 147 grain projectile and about 3.5 grains of powder. For a semi auto it is a balance between enough powder to cycle the action and not too much to avoid the supersonic crack. Too little powder and your semi auto acts like a bolt action, way to little powder and the projectile might not clear the barrel. As a bonus: 45 cal is already subsonic.",
"There's a \"labyrinth\" (realized as a series of baffles) inside the silencer that the expanding gases are forced through. This dissipates the acoustic energy. Suppressed weapons are still loud, though. A suppressed 9mm is still loud enough to incur temporary hearing damage. It's more about making the weapon not sound like a weapon than making it silent.",
"If you were to cut a suppressor in half you'd see dozens of tiny chambers that forces the gas through like a maze. The longer the route to the exit the less noise.",
"A supressor works much the same way a cars muffler works. When you fire most moden guns, the firing pin strikes the primer which is essentially a blasting cap that ignites the gun powder inside the bullet cartridge. The expanding gasses have nowhere to escape, so they force the bullet out of the cartridge at a high velocity. The loud noise that you hear is the escaping gasses, or the \"explosion\". When you put a suppressor at the end of the barrel, it is basically a muffler, and has baffles for the gasses to escape into, slowing them down, which caused the sound to be reduced as there is less gas escaping through the end of the barrel.",
"Ok so basically when you fire an unsuppressed gun, after the round exits there is a large comical discharge of superheated gas from the ignition of the chemicals that propel the round out. The compressed gas is ignited and this creates an expanding, hot mess of gas which gives out a lot of energy which is heat and, of course, sound The reason it is loud is it comes out all at once in a very loud “crack” noise from a very small, compressed chamber very quickly. The base function of a suppressor is to harness this energy and do a few things with it, namely reduce the decibel output of the rifle/pistol. There are two ways to do this. 1) convert sound to a different form of energy 2) distribute the sound over a larger area/time. The second method is the most effective and, by using fluting and funnelling the noise output is changed in two ways (one of which is very cool) So the old standard way would be to have some sort of mesh/foam/low density material with lots of air pockets/funnels through which the gases could escape. This would, not only absorb high energy shockwaves of the combustion of the chemicals but would allow a greater amount of “paths” the gases can use to escape the barrel. This is the fundamental method of how a suppressor works. Modern suppressors, however, are very cool. They incorporate this “padding” technique to minimise previously discussed issues, but there are two features that work together to do something very cool. The first is funnelling - those gases that are in the barrel propel the round out but a lot of the propulsion is lost as energy in these gases. What the funnel in features do is channel these exhaust gases back down a short length of the barrel which further increases the pressure behind the round to give a greater propulsion. The second part of this system is fluting which is put in place near the head of the suppressor (also used on things like muzzle brakes). This is simply to account for this increased pressure. This two part system is fairly new, I think, but it greatly increased the efficiency of the rifle and allows more energy from the rounds to be converted to kinetic energy in the round (though it does mean the suppressors cost more) Also it’s important to note that, despite common misconceptions, it’s very hard to remove this sound energy as it comes out so aggressively and quickly that not much can be done. Despite what I’ve discussed above, suppressors do not “silence” the gun as a lot of people think (that’s why it’s wrong to call them silencers), they merely remove the crack of the rifle and this makes it very hard to orient the shot and locate its origins (and hear, of course) Sorry I know this is a lot of words I waffle a lot. Hope this helps",
"Imagine blowing a balloon up until it pops, and now imagine poking a bunch of tiny holes in the balloon and then blowing it up at the same speed for the same duration. When you fire a gun all the gasses are trapped behind the bullet, which is what propels the bullet out of the barrel. As soon as the bullet leaves the barrel you have a huge amount of pressurized gas causing a pressure wave (sound) all at once. Same with the balloon, once it pops, you get a large amount of air moving toward your ears at once. When you use a suppressor, the gas gets looped around in the suppressor as it slowly exits through multiple holes and exits the barrel slowly, taking longer to dissipate but in doing so it doesn't have as much pressure when exiting, i.e. less energy behind the pressure wave, i.e. more quiet. Same with the balloon with holes in it, the balloon will take longer to deflate, but it will do so without a loud pop and more of a quiet \"hiss\" sound. Suppressors are actually pretty intricate pieces of equipment. They have to have enough volume to encapsulate most, if not all, of the gas from a specific weapon, and a specific cartridge (some bullets for the same gun can have much different velocities and produce more or less gas), yet they have to actually vent the gas fast enough to where if you fire multiple rounds fast enough you aren't going to damage the integrity of the device too much or blow it apart with too much pressure. I'm not sure about modern suppressors but a few years ago (maybe like 10 by now) when I was looking into somehow getting one for an AR I used to own some of the suppressors were only really rated for a few thousand rounds of ammunition before they would become less effective or possibly even break. Now days I'm sure they are much more robust and effective though.",
"Didn't see this posted in the comments, but a sub sonic round fired through a suppressor will be drastically quieter than other rounds fired through a suppressor. Example: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 )",
"As others have said, suppressors work by slowing down or trapping the gasses created by the combusting gunpowder. What hasn't been mentioned is that they do nothing for the sonic boom from the bullet breaking the sound barrier. For that you have to use low velocity ammunition like in [this]( URL_0 ) video. (Jump to 6:30 for the actual shooting). At that point the gun really is silent and the only sound is the action cycling. The draw back is that low velocity ammunition has significantly reduced range and accuracy.",
"There are 3 sounds to a firearm: -movement of the action as the firearm cycles -sonic boom (subsonic ammunition does not have this) -gasses escaping the barrel Suppressors reduce the noise of a firearm by using baffles to slow down the gasses that way they produce less noise when they start escaping the barrel. Please note that supressed guns, even with subsonic ammunition and all the tricks in the book to improve how effective the suppressor works, the firearm will still have a loud, identifiable report, but now it is closer to a loud paintball marker.",
"Imagine you have 100 people. All of them want to ride one ride and the theme park hasn't set up anything for the rides waiting passengers, so everyone fights to get on, making a lot of noise because some people act rough trying to get to the front. Now imagine you take those same people and the same ride, but this time the park managers set up a line with clear directions for the park goers to follow. There's a lot less chaos and noise because things are more orderly, and the customers are being guided rather than all hell breaking loose. A silencer is an attachment that has a lot of pathways, much like the ride queue, and the riders represent the gas coming out of a gun"
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9qzikr | sometimes i find "4k" version of a movie that has smaller size than a 1080p version movie. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What you are seeing is compression. Compression is basically using math to figure out what parts of an image can be thrown away and calculated again later, instead of sending every pixel. There are many different kinds of compression, some are lossless, meaning the full image can be rebuilt perfectly pixel for pixel. Others have some loss, but they can get even smaller. JPEG is an example of compression with loss, you can see JPEG start to get fuzzy, because the compression is allowed to make small mistakes to get the image to be smaller. Which one is better? It is hard to say without knowing what kind of compression they went through. The FHD could be basically uncompressed while the 4k image is compressed with a lossless method. This would mean that the 4k is better even if it is smaller. Once again, I don't know what you are looking at or how they were compressed, so I don't know for sure."
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9r0y15 | How come some pictures from the 1920/30s have what looks like higher resolution than pictures from the 1950/60s? | ELI5: How come some pictures from the 1920/30s have what looks like higher resolution than pictures from the 1950/60s? I've seen pictures from all of the decades and it just confuses me why there would be a better picture quality 40 years prior to the low res photo. I know there's obvious explanations like the people in the later photo were moving or they had a worse camera than the one used in decades prior but that doesn't make sense to me. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Kodak Instamatic. Released in 1963, the Kodak Instamatic was a series of cheap, easy to use cameras. They generally had a fixed focus, minimal controls for aperture and shutter speed, and used very small negatives that were generally very \"fast\" (i.e. ISO 200 or 400). It was possible to take good pictures with an Instamatic, but just like older cameras you had to take the time to do it right: you had to have the right light, be exactly the right distance from the subject, stand still, etc. If any of those elements were off (especially the distance one) your photo would be blurry. Prior to the Instamatic (and other easy to use cameras, like the Polaroid Land camera) taking a photo was a complicated process, and expensive. If you were going to take a picture, you took the time to set it up and do it right.",
"To get a fair comparison, you would have to check which pictures were taken on old cameras with plate negatives, needing no enlarging when printed, and which on smaller format film. Which were taken in studios and which were by hand-held cameras. Which were on slow, fine-grain emulsions and which were on high sensitivity but grainier stock.",
"The photos that were usually taken in the 1920s/30s and usually survive to this day, are studio shots, done carefully with large fixed cameras, they had a lot of effort and care put into them. Photos from 1950s/60s are often taken on cheap, pocketable 35mm cameras, so they were done on the fly, with less setup, and yes, on worse equipment. In some aspects of photography, there is surprisingly little progress. Used lenses from cameras half a century old or more can still produce wonderful photos, and are still in high demand among serious photography enthusiasts (which is why big old companies like Nikon and Canon make sure you can attach their historic lenses to the newest digital SLRs easily). Hell, even old mechanical film cameras themselves are definitely still able to produce worthwhile photos and are still in demand - film is still being made for them, they are actively traded in specialist and antique shops, etc.",
"There are several good reasons that the camera could have been worse, 40 years later. Film quality is an issue. /u/varialectio addresses different types and sizes of film. I want to emphasize film size-- as cameras became cheaper and handheld, they *needed* to use smaller film sizes to achieve those things. Lens quality is also an issue. We still struggle with this *today* with cell phone cameras. As you scale the lens down, it needs to be made of the right material and have great quality to perform. The same size imperfection will show up as a larger distortion of the image. Some imperfections aren't a limit of the available technology, but an effect of the expense or cheapness of how the device is made. Handheld, consumer-grade cameras have always suffered and always *will* suffer compared to professional-grade and larger ones. It's not that the best cameras of 1960 were worse than the best cameras of 1920. Instead, more people owned a greater variety of cameras in 1960, and some of them were poor quality-- not due to the technology of 1960s, but due to the cheapness or design limitations of that specific product."
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9r1cbu | How can vinyl store the different range of sounds in music within itself? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> I can understand it with single tones and such, but in music there is often many different instruments on top of each other playing simultaneously. It is only one complex wave. Consider sound in air, it is a pressure wave right? And can air be different pressures at the same place and time? Of course not! This means multiple sounds, multiple pressure waves, must combine into a single complex wave when they interact. This is called \"interference\" and it happens both constructively and destructively. So the texture of the groove on the record records the vibration of the air which is the sound, including all the overlapping instruments."
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9r4nbu | What prevents flat wires from getting tangled compared to round wires? | And why aren't more flat wires produced then? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wire will curl in the path of least resistance and so flat wire will naturally try to turn in on itself in the direction of one of the flat sides where as round wire can twist and curl easily in any direction it needs to and this can end in a tangled mess quite effectively. The reason round wire is used more for daily applications such as phone chargers, vacuum cleaners, or extension cords is because these wires are moved around a lot and need the mobility of the round wire for practical ease of use because the wire will be malleable and move in the direction you want it to where as a flat wire won’t easily bend or turn in the direction of the thin edges and has a chance of damaging if forced to do so."
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9r6y2s | Why do eyes sometimes look red in video recordings, especially those at night | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So, background information: the pupil of the human eye dilates in low light, and contracts in bright light. In low-light situations, the pupil is dilated. Also in low-light situations, a camera will typically have its flash activated. Compact cameras have their flash situated close to the camera lens, and it's the combination of all three of these factors that causes the red-eye effect. When the flash goes off, it's too quick for the pupil to contract. Thus, the camera flash passes through the pupil, hits the back of the eye, and bounces back. Because the flash is very close to the lens, the light is aligned well enough that a chunk of the light hits the camera lens and gets recorded. There's a lot of blood in the back of the eye, and that gives the reflected light its red color."
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9r8gvv | Why is it that when putting somebody on speaker phone when calling them, the microphone doesn't pick up their voice - resulting in them hearing themselves talk? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a circuit or software in speakerphones that does *echo cancellation*. The details get a bit complicated because it has to handle things like different-sized rooms and distortion, but basically the idea is that the system looks at what the speaker is playing and then attempts to cancel that same sound out of what's being picked up by the microphone.",
"The phone knows what signal it is outputting to the speaker, and knows to subtract that signal from what it's getting from the microphone. When the phone doesn't know this, you get an echo - this happens when people call in to the radio, and leave their own radio playing during the call.",
"This actually does happen whenever my partner calls me from her car. I'll say something and then about a second later my awful voice will come back through my phone and completely distract me from what I was saying. Drives me bonkers.",
"Older cellphones and cheaper ones did do that. I know because an old job I had had me dealing with customers on the phone and occasionally they'd call with me on speaker phone. I remember a few times I couldn't talk because hearing myself was so confusing. Told them to take me off speaker or call back later.",
"Not sure how i would explain it to a 5 year old but literally you just subtract one signal from the other. It might be easier to visualise if you remember that you only ever hear one 'sound'. The separation into different sources, voices and directions is done in your brain. You can subtract and add sound signals almost as easy as any other addition and subtraction."
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9r8jye | How does Google know which image to output only with words? | I believe that you cannot tag an image, so how does typing "red car" leads to google showing you an actual picture of a red car for instance? I mean how does it know a picture and keywords in the search bar are the same thing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Quite some misinformation here. Contrary to your statement, you can actually tag images. Simply naming the picture \"red-car-bmw.png\" instead of \"IMG-4568743.png\" is already something Google will pick up. Besides that a lot of other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques come down to tagging pages with keywords, relevant titles, and constant tagging of information. The more information you give Google about what's on the page, the more Google will be able to show it in relevant search queries. This is good for both Google and the site developers. Machine learning doesn't really compete with this for two reasons: * You would need to pass all images to the algorithm, then see which are recognized as \"red car\". Now you just search for all images labeled as \"red car\", which is a much smaller set of images and goes a lot faster. * It's pretty easy to train an algorithm (usually a neural network) to recognize red cars, or cars in general, or vehicles. But you can't train a network that recognizes any search term you put into it.",
"People who upload images add descriptions to tell search engines what the image is. The image filename itself is one indicator. Whoever uploaded the image may have called it red-car.jpg. In HTML, img tags also have an alt attribute that describes the content of the image, so the HTML img tag might be < img src=\"red-car.jpg\" alt=\"Picture of a red car parked on the side of the road.\"/ > The content around the image may also be taken into account. If you have a page that talks about red cars a lot, then search engines can infer that pictures on that page are related to red cars in some way. I believe Google also tracks how users responded to past search results. Lots of people probably Googled \"red car\" before you, and Google will keep tracking of what links they ultimately used, then make those links higher for other people searching for \"red car.\""
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9r8q3a | what is the design process of building an application? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ex-developer and now IT project manager here. It depends on the size and complexity of the application. For little wee ones like an Excel macro that processes a sheet or a data-cleansing routine, you usually have an idea in mind of what you need to have happen, so you break it down into steps and work through developing each step. So your mental map of the data cleanser might be: Pick up a record, look at it for these features, correct these features if you find them, put back that record in a new area. Then you build those (sometimes in order, sometimes not), test and tweak it as you go along until it's done. For slightly larger and more complex apps, such as a simple game, first someone thinks about where they want to go with it, then they write the basics down to describe it to whoever is paying for it to justify getting money (if not themselves). With that concept of the game there, they start breaking it down into what they need to do first - for example, a sidescrolling game needs the ability for the character to stand on something, or a data processing application needs to connect to a data source and read a record from it - and work through that, then meshing out each additional detail as they continue. Sometimes this approach needs a concept demo too, such as if you're going after kickstarter funding. The developer invests some of their time into building a tiny part of the game that will look and feel a little like the end product, then shows it to the people they want money from so that audience can see what they're going to get. Then the now-funded developer gets approval and funding to do all the remaining detail work. Big projects need teams need a much larger approach. You start with the basics in a story - \"it will be a first person science fiction single-player shooter with a machine possession mechanic and will support multiplayer\", and then each of your sub-teams on it gets their piece to do once you've decided on fundamentals like what gaming engine you're going to use if you don't build your own, what platforms you're going to target, and who the target audience is (e.g. whether it has cartoony characters or gory exploding ones). The story/script team starts building how the visual world will work and how single-person gameplay will flow by working closely with the art design team, and the technical team weighs in on what's technically possible versus what's not. This is a very back-and-forth process. The multiplayer mechanics team starts working on getting all the send/receive processing going. Then as things work along, all the team leaders meet and check with the boss to ensure they're staying on direction, trading information and changes around, and hitting deadlines, and they adjust as they go along. The \"traditional way\" of doing all that organizing, called \"waterfall\", was to write down and get a signed off list of details before you start coding. The \"modern way\" is called \"agile\" and saying \"This is what we're pointing at doing this month\", getting approval for that, then doing it and figuring out what the next month's work will be like when the time comes. Agile is more flexible than waterfall, but it's also less locked-in, so it's useful for some types of projects more than others.",
"1. identify the need that your app will address 2. write up imaginary cases where a person would want to use your app to address that need 3. write up a technical description of which features are necessary to satisfy 2 4. blueprint out the app - mock up, wireframe, design, however you want to approach, but take 3 and turn it into something that’s laid out visually 5. take 4 and turn it into something that *looks* as close as possible to the final version 6. write code until it looks like 5 and functions as described in 3 7. test the shit out of it, making edits to 5 and 6 to reflect test results 8. finalize the app, and get ready to release it!",
"The design process or the development process? Development environments and technology standards allow for very agile, iterative approaches these days. So depending on the scale of the project (ie number of people) design phase might be skipped completely in favour of jumping straight into a working prototype. I'm a software developer and often the design phase is as simple as a few bullet points of requirements, maybe a sketch of the layout. We aim to get something working and usable as soon as possible, so we can get a smaller feedback loop. You don't want to spend 3 months working on something, then reveal it, only to have it be all wrong or unfit for practical use. & #x200B; A common approach in the industry is to have a collection of \"user stories\". These are simple requirements from the perspective of one or more user, which can later be translated into functionality and design choices for the developer. These user stories are then turned into work items and assigned to the appropriate developer. & #x200B; Example: As a customer I want to save my bank details for use later. As a customer I want to save my address for use later. As a customer I want to order pizza. As a driver I want gps navigation to the customer's house. As a vendor I want to upload my menu.",
"Software developer for Amazon Web Services here. In the interest of keeping in ELI5 spirit: People have different ways of doing this. Some people like thinking really hard, and then writing down what they thought about. They get other people who also thought really hard about it to read what they wrote. Even more people who are friends with the people who will use the application read what they wrote and think really hard about what their friends want. If the application is going to be really big, this takes a really long time because everyone has to say yes. Then engineers get in a room for lots of months and build the application. On some date that everyone agreed on, the application gets released. Then everyone hopes they were right about what users wanted. This is called Waterfall development. Other people don't spend as much time thinking about it, and they usually don't write down what they thought. They start building right away, knowing they're probably going to be wrong a few times. Then they go ask all their friends after maybe a couple weeks if they like what they built so far. It's a bonus if those friends will actually end up using the thing they built. They then take what their friends said and change what they built so that their friends like it more. They keep doing this until people want them to start doing a different thing more. That's called Agile. Sometimes people do stuff like sit together and build at the same time (pair/mob programming), or write a little program that says what to build and then build to make the program happy (test driven development), or even guess every two weeks how much stuff they can do in the next two weeks (scrum). People can do stuff like that whether they use Waterfall, Agile, or something different. No matter what though, they're all just different ways of trying to make people a little happier by writing code."
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9r9rh6 | differences between using a loopback connector and my loopback address | My networking professor was showing us an ethernet loopback plug and didn't do a great job explaining the difference between using the connector for troubleshooting your NIC and pinging your loopback address. He mentioned something about pinging your loopback address still goes to the switch and the routing table is what tells the packet to go back to the source computer, whereas the loopback plug just loops back to your NIC directly when you ping a website. That doesn't make sense to me though because wouldn't that mean that you would need to be connected to a switch to be able to use your loopback address? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As far as I know and have been taught the use of the loopback address does not require any sort of external connectivity. The looping back happens in the computer itself and should work even with no cable plugged in. pinging 127.x.y.z never leaves your own computer. It likely won't even get as far as the hardware NIC and loop back somewhere in the software and driver stack. Pinging your won IP will go as far as the associated Network interface hardware and then turn back there. A loopback plug will go a step further and ensure that signals actually physically leave the port. (I don't think those are a very common tool for networking nowadays though.)"
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9rb0al | How does 3D printing work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not too dissimilar from a very precise hot glue gun that can squirt a tiny amount of liquid in a precise location. Following software to match a design.",
"imagine squeezing a tube of toothpaste to draw a shape on the table. the toothpaste becomes solid as soon as it hits the table. then you squeeze more tooth paste on top of the harden paste to make a new layer. continue until you have a 3d shape in front of you"
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9rckfx | How was the first computer program programmed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It all depends on what you call \"a computer\". In 1804 there was a [\"computer controlled loom\"]( URL_0 ) for making complex patterns in the fabric. The program was a long series of cards with holes drilled in them. It was mechanical. If electrical and mechanical counts, then the Bombe built in Bletchley Park was first. It is programmed by arranging its cams and wires. It's a one-trick pony, it only does one thing. If you think a computer needs to me electrical, then one of the vacuum tube computers was first (probably BINAC in 1948). They are programmed by plugging wires into jacks on the side of the machine (which is the size of a van).",
"it was a series of mechanical switches being turned on or off. im pretty sure it was the code breaking machine designed to crack german enigma codes in ww2.",
"Google could probably answer this more accurately, but my dad would come home from NASA in the 1960s-70s with punch cards, which look like work time cards (if you remember those) and they were punched out and fed into a machine which read the cards like modern computers read a press of the keyboard. So, instead of typing code they punched cards and fed those to the machine which interpreted that as code. It took a long time! The programs and data were stored on giant reels of tape!"
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9rdi3b | How does a railgun work and why are there no flames while the projectile is in the air and then lots of flames and sparks on impact? | See this gif here: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) Edit: fixed bad characters before the link | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a decent amount of misinformation in this thread, so I'll try to correct that as simply as possible. Railguns generally don't work by \"Electromagnets in front of the projectile pulling it forwards\" as another poster said. A Railgun is made up of two parallel rails, with a conductive projectile placed between them. The Rails are hooked up to an immensely powerful source of electricity which flows along the first rail, across the projectile,onto the second rail and back to the power source, creating a complete circuit. All circuits create electromagnetism relative to the strength of their current. The interplay of an Electric electric charge and a Magnetic field creates something called a Lorentz Force. This is the force that drives our projectile. Lorentz force follows something called the 'Right Hand Rule' which means if you curl your right hand to represent the rotation of the Magnetic Field, the Lorentz Force is exerted in the direction of your thumb, in this case the Lorentz force pushes the connected projectile forward along the rails down the barrel, continuously applied as long as the projectile is connected to the rails, causing the projectile to accelerate quite quickly. However, the Lorentz Force is quite weak, about .2 Micro-Netwons per amp. This means Railguns require a truly prodigious amount of electricity to operate",
"The sparks on impact are caused by intense kinetic deformation of the projectile and target. When you bend metal it gets hot. The faster you bend it the hotter it gets. When you bend metal at several times the speed of sound it gets so hot so fast that you get little white-hot pieces of metal flying off.",
"A railgun, put very simply, is a pair of metal bars placed parallel to one another and connected by a bunch of capacitors, which store electrical energy in a way where you can dump all of it into the rails very very quickly rather than slowly like a battery does. Your projectile connects the two rails, completing the circuit. When you switch the circuit on, suddenly those capacitors empty all of their stored electrical energy into the rails and cause the projectile to move along them. This is called the Lorentz Force, and it's the result of an electromagnetic field acting on charged particles (in this case, the ones in the projectile). With a railgun, the enormous amount of energy released into the circuit makes that projectile move *extremely* fast. When the projectile exits the barrel, if you look closely you actually will see sparks and flame erupting from the barrel. This is because your projectile is moving so fast that the friction it creates by rubbing against the rails causes the metal to become so hot it melts and flakes off. When the projectile travels through the air, however, it's not touching anything solid that can be chipped off or melted, so there are no flames. So now we get to when your projectile hits something. Well, heat is just kinetic energy that's not aimed in a single direction. In hot things, the atoms bounce around and knock into one another, and when they vibrate fast enough, they can pull away from nearby atoms. In solids, this results in melting, and in liquids, they vaporise. Your projectile has a *huge* amount of kinetic energy in it, which all gets transferred to whatever it hits in a very short period of time. So short, the projectile actually ends up getting *very* hot as it can't transfer its kinetic energy fast enough, so it violently explodes. Bits of molten metal and whatever it hit go *everywhere*, appearing as a burst of flame. EDIT: couple of spelling errors.",
"Actually no one is mentioning it, but most railguns do launch with a lot of flames. Even though there is no combustion to launch the projectile, at initial launch the round is traveling fast enough to turn the air around it into superheated plasma. Here's the longer video of that gif. [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 )",
"a rail gun accelerates it's projectile using electromagnetic force rather than controlled explosions like a tradition gun or rocket, hence no flames. the sparks on impact are due the energy of the collision.",
"Just to contribute, Yes most people are confusing the concepts of a magnetic coil gun and a rail gun. Coil/Gauss cannon: series of electromagnets that are activated in sequence to accelerate a metal projectile as they go through. Think of this like a ton of people in a line giving a little push to a bobsled as it comes by. RailGun: You have two parallel rails, and a magnetic+conductive round between them. As you pass current through them, because of the way magnetic fields are created anytime electric currents change, the round is pushed outwards. If you pass enough current, like with a giant capacitor, it accelerates very quickly. There is no fire/flames because there is no explosion or expanding of gases. The sparks are just because it's hitting with so much force that the energy heats up whatever material it hits very quickly (a fun fact that i like related to that last point, if you get missiles to go fast enough, it's useless to add an explosive to it. The energy of how fast the projectile is going is so much greater than any explosive could give. This is why meteors can leave such massive explosion craters.)",
"All those sparks you see are bits and pieces of metal that have broken off the steel plates as the projectile blasted through them.",
"My boss worked with the people who made the railguns that are on destroyers now. The reason the projectile moves is already up here, the reason for the flames and sparks on impact is because the projectile is made out of aluminum, aluminum is flammable when super hot. So when it hits something with great speed it burns super hot in the shape of a cone, melting and destroying metal, that's why railguns are used as anti armor",
"Not sure if there's any real difference, but in coil guns you have something like Coil - sensor - coil - sensor - etc. When you pull the trigger you push the projectile forward into a sensor which turns on the first coil pulling the projectile forward. Once the projectile gets far enough in it then hits the next sensor turning off the previous coil and turning on the next one until the projectile has left the weapon. As for the fire, that happens because once the projectile is moving fast enough it instantly heats the target up enough to set any sparks or fragments on fire. And if it's a sufficiently fast projectile, the outer layer of the projectile is peeled off and also set on fire. I hope this helps. EDIT: Just read the comments. I didn't know this was a 'Gauss Gun'. Might have to study up.",
"1. Railguns don't use gunpowder or other explosions to make the projectile fly, so there's no explosion to at the beginning (at least not propelling the projectile forward) * While the projectile is in the air, it's just a chunk of solid metal, there's no rocket or anything, so there are no flames (although often it goes so fast it turns the air into plasma, so you might see that) * There are lots of flames / sparks on impact because metal is hitting metal at about 2400 m/s or 8500 km/h. That amount of energy has to go somewhere, and most of it is transformed into heat. That is instantly causing the metals to melt and turn into a red or white hot molten liquid. The flames / sparks you see aren't burning rocket fuel, gas, etc. it's red or white hot metal exploding away from the impact spot."
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9rf11m | Ethernet cables and what they do. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ethernet is the most common _wired_ networking technology. When you want to connect one or more computers together as part of a network, you need a *router*. A router does just what it sounds like -- it _routes_ traffic around a network or between networks (like, say, your home network and the Internet). There are two ways to connect a computer (or other device, like a phone or tablet or printer or refrigerator or whatever) to a router: wireless or wired. Wireless networks uses radio signals to send information between the computer/device and the router. The advantage of wireless is ... well, no wires! Wired networks use a particular kind of cable -- an Ethernet cable -- to send information between the computer or other device and the router. The advantage of Ethernet is it is much faster than wireless connections. Ethernet is not the only standard for network cables, but it is *by far* the most common worldwide."
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9rfdgu | Why do phones slow down when its cold? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because phone batteries rely on electrochemical reactions where chemical energy is converted to electrical energy. Temperature is essentially a measure of the average kinetic energy in a system so a decrease in temperature means a decrease in how fast the particles move. For a chemical reaction to occur the particles involved must collide with each other at a certain speed (and angle) to form the product molecule or particle. When temperature decreases the average kinetic energy decreases too which means that the particles involved in the reaction move slower and therefore collide less frequently. So, lower rate of reaction = less electrical energy produced. I’m certainly no expert on phones but I’m assuming that when you’re using your phone, a minimum of energy needs to be produced in order to sustain whatever function you’re executing. This is the same reasoning I’d use for explaining why the phone battery declines at some point - I guess the rate of reaction just slows down so much at a certain temperature that it’s not possible to keep the phone turned on any longer even if it still displays a high battery percentage left. An easy fix for this is to just keep your phone close to a warm body part for maybe 10-15 minutes."
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9rj5yj | Why modern animated cartoons don't look as good as Tom and Jerry that was made in 1940? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cartooning is very labor intensive work. These days it varies a little but when you film with a camera, you record 24 frames per second. That means one second of film consists of 24 images. If you're making a cartoon, that means you need 24 drawings for every second of motion picture you want. That is a huge amount of work, which is why cartoonists like to cheat. Most old school animation was animated on 2's. That means that every drawing is displayed on screen for 2 consecutive frames. Now you only need to draw 12 images to fill a second of motion picture at 24 frames per second. What makes modern animation look worse than 1940's animation is that animators tend to 'cheat' a lot more than they used to. In the golden age of animation, the entire character was animated. Full body animations with lots of bounce, stretch and squash effects to exaggerate body motions and such. Characters also tended to be very energetic with lots of slapstick physical humour. Most modern cartoon characters are animated in a way that minimises motion. There's lots of shots and scenes for instance where almost the entire character is static and only the character's mouth and eyes are animated as it speaks. Think of scenes that are full of dialogue with the view just switching back and forth between characters that are mostly static. Or anime type scenes where the action is either so fast that motions only take a few frames of animation or the character is simply 'powering up' with lots of flashy background animations but no real body animation. Most modern animation shows are also a lot skimpier on the frames. Where looney toons might animate on two's (each frame is displayed twice in a row), many modern animations are animated on fours or even fives and sixes, so less frames have to be drawn. There's a ton of examples of how you can cheat in animation to speed up production but the short of it is that the old school way of doing it basically meant putting in a ton of labour. And we mostly don't want to do that anymore because it's too expensive and slow.",
"Dude, old cartoons were works of art! Carefully crafted by hand and intended to be seen on movie screens, not tiny TV sets. And there were poor quality animated cartoons back then, mostly the banal, mass appeal stuff that was meant to be quickly produced and put of TV. Just look at the Flintstones or the Jetsons (for as long as you can before your eyes melt). AND there are still highly crafted animations still made today. Look at anything Studio Ghibli makes. Like most things, a lot of care and effort makes something good, while slapping something together quickly for a quick buck looks bad.",
"In addition to everything already mentioned, there's also the fact that poor quality things are forgotten over time. The reason why the older television shows, movies, and cartoon are so good is that only the best of the best still get watched decades later. For every work of art remembered decades or centuries later, hundred are forgotten, so the further back you go, you tend to end up with an even more select group of the best of the best. All the common, ordinary, lower quality cartoons have simply been forgotten over the years.",
"I think the biggest difference is that the original \"Tom & Jerry\" cartoons weren't TV episodes; they were short films produced for the cinema. They made 6 or 8 films per year instead of two dozen episodes like The Simpsons.",
"There was more money in making them back then. Before TVs people main form of visual entertainment was the cinema, going multiple times a week. Cinemas would bundle several types of film together to provide a whole nights entertainment - starting off with a newsreel, and then before the main feature they would have a cartoon, which created demand for quality animation.",
"Remember when a character was running in the house or something and they'd pass the same window and lampstand like five times even though they never turned?",
"r/LeWrongGeneration Just kidding OP it’s because they used to draw the art frame by frame. It was much less efficient that it is done now. Check out cup head if you’re interested in modern renditions of this.",
"A Tom and Jerry cartoon from the golden era (Hannah-Barbera, dir Fred Quimby) took a year to make. No-one is going to do that for a five minute short now.",
"In addition to the other things I saw mentioned a lot of 2d animation is made with different techniques. Instead of a characters full body being animated, the character has a bone rigging that moves individual parts. If it's done well it can look good, but it's never as good as full body animation, and some of it is pretty awful.",
"Today there are a lot of digital tools that make animation easier. As a result, more people can do it – but that doesn't mean they're good at it. Back in the day, it was much harder, and so the few people doing it had to be very good. It's like music – everyone has Garageband these days, but that has resulted in a lot more bad music. Back in the day, if you got in the door of a recording studio, you were probably more talented than most – and the people running the controls were certainly an elite group of people.",
"Cost, mainly. You can still do it, and probably cheaper, but it's still expensive. The old T & J shorts had a good budget and were shown in the cinema. What you mostly see nowadays is stuff made for TV or similar with a lower budget, often outsourced to countries with lower produciton cost. Technology has made the tools accessible and it's easier to get acceptable results pretty quick; it's not so important to keep the characters articulated in all dimensions as it is to get work done on time. There's still plenty of good stuff out there, and you can find pretty decent traditional full animation coming out of Europe and elsewhere.",
"\\- Many modern cartoons are animated in Flash. They use \"motion tweens\" which give unnaturally smooth transitions for certain actions (often visible with eye movements). You select a point A and a point B and the number of frames you want in between and the layer with that character feature on it will slide the distance in between. It looks so artificial... because it is. & #x200B; \\- Modern cartoons don't have those detailed hand-painted backgrounds you see in a lot of older ones. This was good because it distinguished the characters from the backgrounds more without taking them out of it. & #x200B; \\- Character designs were more organic. Many modern cartoons have weird looking designs that don't flow as well. Lots of geometric shapes are used these days. Straight lines and right angles (ugh, character heads that have corners are the worst) or perfect circles, squares, etc. Also outlines are a big deal - some modern cartoons have needlessly thick outlines and many others don't have them at all. Neither look that good. & #x200B; \\- And as others said - budget, time restraints, cheating and priorities. These together all mean the difference between a Pixar visual masterpiece and some garbage made for pre schoolers that looks like it was animated by college students working on their first project."
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9rkgfe | 32 bit windows vs 64 bit windows. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Computer memory has addresses, similar to street addresses. Imagine a street where you could only have a 1-digit house number, like \"3 Imaginery Street\". You can only fit 9 houses on this street -- house numbers 1-9. But if the house numbers were two digits, like \"35 Imaginery Street\", you could fit 99 houses on the street. 32- and 64- bit computers are similar, in that the 64-bit kind can process bigger blocks of data at one time, because the computer has a way of *addressing* that data."
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9rkx6w | What makes cassette tapes degrade in quality? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cassette tapes are long plastic ribbons coated with magnetic material that has been charged just right with your recordings. A few things combine to degrade these over time. To keep the long ribbons from tangling, they're spun into spools (thus the cassette). Keeping the magnetic material pressed together like that risks the charges from one spool affecting the others. The magnetic material isn't permanent, but just lasts a long time. As you play the cassette a few bad things happen. First, the plastic can stretch. This will happen just by the way the tape is turned so the ribbon spools from one side to the other. Also, like the magnetic material, plastic doesn't last forever, just a long time. There may be additional impact of playing the cassette as the tape makes contact with the cassette player. There are wheels to help move and keep the tape taught as it passes over the reader, and the reader itself. The reader is essentially a magnetic field detector, but the magnetic field is so small they need to physically touch. While negligible each time, one thing that can cause degredation is the miniscule electromagnetic interference by both the electronics in the cassette player as you play the cassette, but also the effect of moving the magnetic material as the cassette spools the ribbon. This happens for all kinds of magnetic media, including audio and video tapes, and except for the stretching bits, old floppy disks.",
"Just to ask, I have some tapes from my grandfather that are more than 40 years old, and I have never played them. What could I do to preserve/not ruin the tapes so I could listen to him? Never heard his voice and I am very curious."
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9rly91 | Why do spears for fishing typically have 3 prongs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Such as a trident? Typically because fish are lateral and linear. Three points broadly struck prevent the fish from gaining enough momentum to wiggle free. 1 or 2, and a fish coukd still.throw its weight back and forth. 3 stabilizes the fish, preventing this."
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9rnxbx | why do physical disc console games still have to install, often over a period of hours before eventually updating and then being playable? | I've just purchased RDR2 and it's take about 2 hours to install and has since been updating for the last 15. The game has arrived on 2 discs. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Blu-Ray drives in current gen consoles don't have the bandwidth to keep up with the data demands of the game itself. So there's no way to run the game directly off the disc. (obviously this depends on the game itself, but it applies to most AAA high-profile releases at the very least, and so was applied to all games) The solution is to install the game so you don't need to worry about drive speed, you can read from the much more performant hard drive. The updates afterwards are a little different depending on how close to launch you purchase. Day 1 patches are what the developers do between the discs being printed for delivery to stores, and the release date. There's enough of a delay there that they can get some last minute fixes and additions sorted. Later down the line, updates obviously build up as part of the typical post-release support many games now see."
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9ro9hz | What is the difference between Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dolby Digital (DD) has multiple sound channels digitally encoding into the audio stream. Basic DD is 5.1, which **must** be left, right, center, left-surround, right-surround, and subwoofer. DD EX adds a 6th channel in the center back. All of these channels are supposed to be at ear level when sitting. Atmos allows for much greater variety and 3D spatial sound. It can have up to 128 audio tracks, and also has extra information about where those tracks should exist in the listening space. You can more or less install tons of speakers all over the room — the standard Dolby locations, speakers higher up on the walls, speakers all over the ceiling, whatever. The receiver/amplifier is programmed to know where all of these speakers are, and uses the audio source information to send all of the right audio to the right speakers. As a result, you end up with sound actually surrounding you — you can hear the rainfall, helicopters flying overhead, whatever the studio wants you to hear — as if you were really there. Edit: Whereas normal surround sound systems are usually 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 (5, 6, or 7 speakers plus a subwoofer), Atmos is notated like 5.1.4 (5 standard surround speakers, 1 sub, and 4 Atmos speakers) or 7.2.6 (7 standard surrounds, 2 subwoofers, and 6 Atmos speakers)."
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9rph1e | in an age of digital downloads why is pre-ordering more popular than ever? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Pre-orders typically offer some sort of bonus. Might be extra content, might be some collectible items, so on. There is also a nice satisfying feeling of having a tangible, physical copy. Add on top of that, some people might not want to wait for 60GB of crap to download if they have slower internet, or are stingy with HDD space, or whatever."
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9rpqpi | Why does making chips require clean facility? | Here in the picture you can see this person is dressed up to avoid bringing dust or other foreign materials into the facility? not sure URL_0 Edit: and by chips I don't just mean CPU.. but also memory devices.. or wafers?! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The components of a microchip are unbelievably tiny. So small that even a single speck of dust could disrupt the manufacturing process and lead to many thousands of dollars worth of lost time and materials.",
"Basically, the conductive paths in a chip are extremely close together. If dust gets in before the chips are coated in a protective material; the dust could create a short circuit or prevent it from working. Also, the natural oils found on human skin can accelerate corrosion and destroy the chip"
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9rqrgz | How did people discover all these patterns in Conway's Game of Life? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The walkers are generated pretty frequently from random starts on Game of Life. So I’d imagine whoever came up with walker generators just reverse engineered it carefully by knowing the simple rules of the 2D cellular automata."
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9rru6x | Why is the video quality of sending a video through text on androids so terrible compared to iPhone? | Android has not even tried to improve this for years, what is the actual reasoning behind such a huge difference? Sometimes pictures are bad too, and you can't text nearly as much data over an android phone, is it all related? Have s9+ and sending videos is not one iota better visually than when I had my s6 edge | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"iPhones cheat. They don’t actually send the texts and pictures through the cell lines, they do it through the wifi or 3g/4g/LTE. Now two Android phones can’t send data to each other via the internet cause they only have each other’s cell phone numbers, so you gotta use the same old lines and be compliant with the same old standards (character limits and such.) If you download an internet messager like whatsapp or facebook this limitation goes away, cause now you are using fast data lines and storing your pix and stuff on company servers before your recipient gets it."
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9rt9o0 | How did GTA V run on the Xbox 360 with 512 MB of RAM while the PC version requires at least 4 GB? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because GTA on the PC uses higher resolution textures, has a farther draw distances, has crisper shadow and blur effects and supports 4k display settings.",
"The primary reason is a gaming console is a fixed system, and a PC is not. A game developer knows every component and every capability of a gaming console, because it's a fixed set of hardware defined by the vendor. Developers love this because it means they can optimize the hell out of their code to work extremely well on that one specific, narrow set of hardware components. On a PC, though, a developer has a harder time optimizing their code, because they cannot predict what hardware any given individual will have. Your PC doesn't have the same capabilities as my PC. So instead of ardently optimizing they're forced to take a \"least common denominator\" approach. It would certainly be possible for a developer to make GTA V run on a PC with only 512 MB of RAM ... but to do so they would need to require that PC to have a certain *type* and *brand* of RAM ... and it would need a specific type and brand of CPU with a specific speed ... and you would only be able to use one brand of graphic card ... and so forth and so on. But if they did that, they'd be limiting their PC market to the handful of people who meet those narrow, specific hardware requirements, and that doesn't make business sense. So system requirements for games on PC are *always* going to be higher than those for consoles, because console games can be optimized for a specific, narrow set of hardware, where PC games cannot.",
"The version that was released on PC isn't the same version that came out on PS3 and Xbox360. The original 2013 release of GTAV was considerably less detailed, with lower detail meshes, and lower quality textures than the version that came out on PS4, XBone and PC well over a year later.",
"PC games are (usually) not just recompiled from the console version. They need to add support for keyboard + mouse control, variable screen resolutions, and the like. Usually, they'll also upgrade the video textures (the \"skin\" of objects) and add other stuff that consoles don't have the power for. Games that don't do this (e.g. Fable anniversary) get poor reviews and don't sell well. One of the most annoying things to a PC gamer is having to deal with a poor quality gaming experience because that's the best a cheap gaming console can manage."
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9rtcnr | How do water pipe systems work in tall buildings? How does it ‘push up’ the water to higher storeys? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Really tall buildings need their own water systems, with pumps and multiple reservoirs to provide adequate water pressure at the top without bursting pipes at the bottom. This is a whole field of engineering on its own, requiring lots of careful design."
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9rtpst | ; why do new console games today need to 'install' what seems like the entire game onto the hard drive but still require the disk?... Disc? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It really is just copy protection. The entire game is installed to the hard disk. You can start playing the game before it's fully installed in some cases, but it will install the rest in the background. The disc is really just needed to prove you have a legitimate license to play the game. If you buy on the Xbox/Playstation store the license is tied to your account. But with a disc it's tied to the disc itself. That advantage to that is it's easy to transfer that license to someone else (you just give or sell them the disc), but the downside is you do need to have the disc in when you play."
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9ru5gv | how do electron guns in tvs work? | Won't it just become a lightining gun? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In older cathode ray tube (CRT) screens there is an electron gun and a phosphor screen inside a vacuum tube. The simplest electron gun is the hot cathode type, which is essentially a filament (usually tungsten) that current is passed through (like a light bulb). When the filament gets hot enough, electrons gain enough thermal energy to escape the filament in a process known as thermionic emission. Tungsten has a high melting point and is relatively cheap so it is the most common filament material. Once the electrons are free, they are swept through the vacuum tube by an electric field towards the phosphor screen (attracted by a positive voltage). The tube need to be evacuated so that electrons do not collide with gas molecules before reaching the phosphor screen, and also the tungsten does not oxidize and burn out (like when you break a light bulb). The electrons strike a phosphor screen and in doing so excite electrons bound to the phosphor material. When the excited electrons relax, the excess energy that they received by being bombarded with the free electrons gets released as a photon, which you see as the picture."
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9rul4y | How does touchscreen technology work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The majority of touch screens are compromised of a number of layers. One of those layers is a capacitive layer that's basically a grid of wires that aren't touching. When you touch the screen you close the citcuit between the wires in the grid and the device uses that information to figure out where you touched it. There are also optical systems that use infrared light to do the same thing where instead of closing a circuit you're breaking a beam of light much like those things that chime when you enter a shop. Some systems use cameras mounted on the corners of the display to track your finger. Larger displays like the table based Microsoft Surface used a camera underneath the device that watched for infrared light released when you pushed on the display and caused the screen to bend, releasing the light. There are a few other options, but those are the Missy common.",
"Depends on the type. Captivate screens (most phones and laptop/tablet screens) use a VERY SMALL grid of electrically conductive material to sense where you finger is. Placing you finger on the screen lets your phone know if an area is pressed and if you drag your finger, the phone tracks which grids are active to determine movement!"
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9rw88r | Why is it that restarting my computer speeds it up again, but shutting it down and turning it on doesn't speed it up at all? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I’ll have to look it up exactly when I get home, but in windows 10, by default, something named ‘fast boot’ or something like that is enabled, which does exactly what you said - more of a deep hibernate than a full power off. You can (and probably should) disable it in power options. I believe it’s under choose what the power buttons do. Restart is actually a full power cycle."
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9rxjv6 | Why do phone batteries die so quickly after a long time of usage compared to when you first buy the phone? | I assume this occurs to all batteries but what exactly happens that doesn't keeps batteries from lasting all day like they do when you first buy them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A battery produces electricity through a chemical reaction. A rechargeable one uses a reaction that can be reversed by applying electricity as well. But some of the atoms undergo different reactions and from compounds and structures that cannot be reversed by applying alectricity. Over time, the amount of material in the battery that can correctly fulfull the original function decreases.",
"Ok this might be hard to visualise but I will try ELI5 style. Picture yourself holding 2 sticks, 1 in each hand. The left stick has 100 marbles attached to it. This is your battery. As you drain power from your battery the marbles all make there way over to the right hand stick (each marble is a %) this is is just part of the battery process so just take that as is. When you recharge batteries the process is reversed and all marbles make their way back over to the left stick. Now, through lots of use some marbles become attached to the sticks kind of 'fused' to the stick so can no longer make the journey between sticks. So if in our case 1 marble gets stuck then the battery now only has the power of 99% it's original amount. This is basically the reason that batteries slowly get weaker over time of lots of use. You may think \"But Jay why is my phone still reading 100% to 0% if it is not fully charging/disscharging\" and that is because the phone is smart enough to adapt to the battery and it knows when a battery is taking in no more power and when it is outputting no more so it will adjust it's 0-100% on the fly. (Edit: for lithium type batteries like are now in phones this next bit doesn't apply as they don't suffer from a cycle memory) This is one reason that battery manufacturers say to make sure you allow a battery to fully drain and fully charge once in a while because the longer your 1% marble stays on that left hand stuck the more likely it is to stay attached to that stick indefinatly (called battery memory). Bonus info: Putting a battery in the freezer for a while will allow some of the fused marbles to be set free from the stick reversing some of the aging but I don't advise you sticking electrical items in the freezer if you don't know what you are doing."
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9rywnd | How does a neural network work and how can you tell it it's purpose? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A neural network, like all machine learning algorithms, approximates an optimization by modifying a function based on the results of many inputs. The easiest example is a linear regression (you can do this on a basic graphic calculator). Let's say I have the line y=2x+7 Can you picture that line? No well then just grab a basic graphing calculator or use a free online version like desmos and graph it. Now what a linear regression does is if we were to take the points (1,9),(2,11),(3,13),(4,15),(5,17),etc and put it into a linear regression it would provide us with 2 outputs A and B where A would be 2 and B would be 7 (for these specific inputs). However let's imagine taking a linear regression of a line that isn't straight, like say y=log(x) Well depending on which points we use to calculate our linear regression will change the output of A and B as it attempts to approximate a function that would best fit the values presented with a straight line... Now a neural network does basically that but its way more complex. Yes a neural network is nothing but a giant mathematical function... Now it's also not new (I think it was first written about in context of computers in 1947). Now a neural network doesn't actually know its purpose, it takes the data and produces the output that it thinks you want, it has no idea what the significance of the inputs or outputs are... And the thing is, many times we have no idea about what input data is and isn't significant... Now the true power of a neural network comes with how it was trained and the data it was trained with... The more data it has to train on usually provides better results (however if your data isn't very good data then it won't matter how much of it you have it will never do good)... An example of bad data would be if we were to use the linear regression model on the line y=x^3 but we only gave it 3 points: (-1,-1),(0,0),(1,1) Now while this would give you an A value of 1 and a B value of 0, if we instead used more points we might instead get a straight line that intersects the line y=x^3 at points that we didn't provide it as data... In fact, out regression model given those points would predict that the input of 3 should have an output of 3 when in reality it should have an output of 27.... So I know the regression anecdote is abstract but probably the best anecdote got a neural network that I have heard is basically a really complex multivariable non-linear regression function. Edit: added non-linear",
"A neural network is trained with data. Whatever your \"purpose\" is, you represent it in the labeling you make on the training data. If you feed in data about the stock market and you label it with \"Should buy\" and \"Should sell\", you're making a NN that will tell you when you should sell and when you should buy. I'd presume you'd label a data element \"should buy\" when if you had bought you would have made more money than acting randomly, but I suppose you could make a NN to lose money faster."
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9ryzoh | How do lasers work, especially the ones that can cut metal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The laser source dumps energy into a cavity oscillator. That oscillator produces light that's all the same frequency and aligned in a coherent beam. By putting lots of energy into a very narrow beam, you can make the small spot where the beam hits a piece of metal hot enough to melt the metal. Metals are opaque, aso they have to absorb the energy in light that shines on them.",
"A laser is a device that is designed to send out a bunch of light all almost in the exact same direction, like a straight line or cylinder, as opposed to something like a flashlight, where the light spreads out in a cone. A laser that cuts metal works by just being super intense. You're just blasting the metal with a ton of energy, the same way you would use a cutting torch. As to how a laser works, there are different types. The \"classic\" laser works by having a small region with mirrors at each end, with one allowing a little more light to pass through than the other. Once light is inside here, it'll bounce between the two mirrors. In the area between is something called a \"gain medium\" like helium + neon gas or carbon dioxide. If you excite the electrons in these gases (with electricity or light for instance), they jump to a higher energy level, then drop down, releasing a photon of light. When you already have light coming by as these electrons are being excited, the new photons that come out end up travelling in the same direction as the originals. So by bouncing the photons back and forth in a straight line with mirrors, the new light being produced keeps going in that direction. This is what gives you the narrow beam of light. Diode lasers, work by taking advantage of the nature of diodes. A diode is two slices of semiconductor stuck together like a piece of white bread on top of a piece of wheat bread. If you slice the sides parallel to each other very cleanly, it makes there be internal reflection, much like the mirrors before. So when you pump electricity through the diode, it's making light just like the gas in the previous type of laser, and the cleanly sliced edges on the diode do the job of the mirrors."
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9rz276 | Why isn't it simple to make voting machines secure with good, function UI? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It could be done, at some cost. Alas, voting machines are bought by government agencies that are usually required to buy from the lowest bidder. Since these agencies are not staffed by people who can assess security, the most competitive company will spend $0 on security and suffer no penalty for their decision. The money they save, by reusing untrustworthy libraries they find for free on GitHub, means they can bid less - so they always win over companies that would use engineering to make a good product."
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9s1sbs | How do stealth planes & drones actually work ? | So I was watching this little gem of a talk [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) .And suddenly got me thinking about stealth drones(from minute 21).I know there are some tricks in building them so they don't get detected by all the technologies.But how is that done, what material do they use? And are stealth drones just unmanned stealth planes ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Stealth aircraft use two main techniques for avoiding radar detection: Using radar-absorbing materials and having certain angles of outer surfaces to reflect radar waves away from the receiver. Radar works by sending out an electromagnetic signal out into the air. Those electromagnetic waves hit aircraft and are bounced back to a radar receiver. The size and location of that aircraft is calculated based on the waves that are reflected by the aircraft from the emitter to the receiver. If you build an aircraft out of material that absorbs rather than reflects radar waves, those waves can't return to the receiver and give information on its whereabouts. Also if the radar waves hit the surface of the aircraft and are deflected upward or anywhere other than the direction of the receiver, the radar station does not have any information on where it is. So using visible light as an example. Let's say you have a searchlight looking for aircraft at night. What you would do is build an aircraft that is black so a lot of visible light is absorbed and not reflected. Then you also design the surface of the aircraft to reflect what light isn't absorbed away from the eyes of the searchlight operator. No light returning to the eyes of the searchlight operator means he cannot see the aircraft. The same principle works with radar."
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9s31si | How do cinema projectors have such high quality compared to personal home projectors? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They got a light source (think: a bulb) that is consuming so much energy it's crazy compared to the tiny box you got in your own living room. And bulbs always create excess heat that needs to be cooled away with active cooling. i.e, fans. Fans are noisy. But no-one in the cinema cares, because that projector is in it's own room, with a glass window. No-one in the audience hears the fan.",
"It's the same like in every industry doing essentially the same like consumers do themselves. You can buy a nice little light effect and it would be enough for you but a company which is earning their money by using lights has the money and the knowledge to buy a more professional product. The projector you are using at home may cost around a thousand dollars, the projectors used by professionals cost much more that that. For that much money they get a better lamp, better optics and the ability to play movies that are stored in a way that is too expensive for the end consumer. Also they will use a much better screen, which makes a lot of difference. They spend hours in calibrating the projector what wouldn't be worth for anyone showing some content for less that a couple thousand people.",
"Like everyone else has said, money. It's literally like the difference between a used Honda and a brand new Rolls Royce. A movie theater projector costs around $75k-$100k and 20,000-30,000 lumen,. Everything about it is precision made, calibrated, and maintained. You can get home theater projectors with DLP 3chip technology, 4k video, 5000 - 8000 lumens, and interchangeable lensing, but it still won't come close to the one at the theater.",
"A big difference is that they use three display devices (DMD or LCOS) to make red/green/blue, so they don't need a rotating filter wheel. Better screens and lenses help too. It's like the difference between a cheap digital camera and a good DSLR and lens.",
"Some have multiple lamps...some have extremely powerful lamps. Some have multiple extremely powerful lamps...that are maintained by professionals. Lenses are excellent, and the projectors have great ventilation keeping them dust free and cool. They also have specialized software optimally running them. They are also mounted at optimum distances/angles...and the screens are designed to be used with them, so they are very bright/clear. Also the files they play are high resolution, using specialized players/processors...that are connected to the projectors with digital cable (fiber/dual link dvi).",
"Home projector pricing makes no sense. Projectors come down to 4 things: Brightness, typically measured in ANSI lumens. More is better, because it means the picture light is stronger than the ambiant light. Typical home projectors will be between 1500 - 3500 ANSI lumens. The outside advertising projector at my local cinema was 8000 ANSI... Contrast, same as a TV. Best noticed displaying a black image. More is better. Keystone, vertical and horizontal are key for placing a projector. It let's you bend the image so you can offset the projector. As projectors can be 4m away a small offset causes a big picture tilt, keystone let's you fix that. Display technology. Optima like a lot of projector brands fire a white beam and encode a colour signal onto it. As the ambiant light increases this causes the much weaker colour signal to fade. Sony, Epson, etc.. have a multi beam technology. While named various things, it boils down to firing red, green and blue beams at the wall. Since there are coloured beams the image doesn't white out. Now why are home projectors poor? Because adoption is less so places sell projectors as a home theatre experience (thousands of pounds). Projectors aren't sold on their specifications but audiophile gimmicks. I have friends who spent £2k on an optima from richer sounds that was half the lumens, lower contrast and the same resolution as my £400 Epson projector. My favourite gimmick 5 years ago was dlp (traditional bulb) vs led. Led had such a price premium that 5 years of daily use later I'm still financially better off by going dlp. Because there isn't a clear specification war going on the market stagnated. It took Epson 5 years to make a projector better than my current one (eh tw 490 vs eh tw 650). Although something happened this year, market seems much saner, as I was going to post examples and failed to quickly find one. Edit - typos/clarity"
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9s354i | Why do battery testers have such a wide range for 'Replace'? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not a capacity meter like your phone etc has. It's a voltage meter. When the voltage of a 1.5V cell gets down to about 1.2V it's pretty much exhausted and the increased internal resistance means it can't supply much current.",
"As the battery wears out, its power decreases. A 70% battery will not only die faster, but will also only be able to supply 70% of the power. A 5V battery at 100% health, will become ~3.7V at 70%. This drop causes power loss as the device is not getting the voltage it needs."
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9s3gll | What is special about this video camera that can record 10 trillion frames per second, enough to see light traveling? Why don’t all video cameras record infinite frames per second? | The videos I’m seeing on Reddit are amazing. We’ve never seen light moving before. But why? What is holding us back from, say, 10 quadrillion frames per second? Edit: [Link]( URL_0 ) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is incredibly hard to make equipment sensitive enough to register so small amounts of light without being disturbed by other sources of noise. To be able to register many frames/second you first need a sensor that is fast enough to register separate frames as quickly as you want. It is similar to how some materials keeps and absorbes heat with different speeds. Metal for example is way quicker than plastic to both absorb heat and to release it. You wouldn need a similar material but that can absorb and register light and then reset to be able to register the next frame you want. Then you need a processor and memory fast enough to register and save each frame, fast memory is expensive. Last of all it is a very small market so the few cameras that are made will be very very expensive. That keeps the maket small which in turn holds back how accessible it is for everyone.",
"if you're talking about what i think you are, they didnt use one camera. they lined up a whole heap of very expensive high-speed cameras with a very slight offset. let's say the first camera shoots 1000 frames/second, and the second camera also shoots 1000 frames/second but it does it 1/2000th of a second later so its frames fall right between the first camera's frames. if you combine the two you get a video with 2000 frames/second",
"Each pixel in a camera is like a bucket catching rainwater. If we want to measure the amount of rain (light) we have to let the bucket fill up. If it's pouring rain (a bright image, or lots of light) it doesn't take long for the bucket to fill up. If it's barely raining (dark image or no light), you have to wait a long time for the bucket to fill up. Tldr: Without getting into details about limits on the speed of the electronics, the pixels in the camera need an amount of time to collect enough light before you measure it."
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9s48le | How does turning the volume up and down on a radio/music player work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the old days, there were vacuum tube amps, also known as “valves.” At its simplest, an electrical valve has three wires, think of them as electricity in, electricity out, and the valve. If the valve wire has no power coming in, then it’s closed. At some voltage, the valve will be all the way open. At values in between, the valve will be partway open. So, say you have a valve that’s fully open at 1 volt, and you run 100 volts through the high voltage side. If you feed in one volt, you’ll get 100 volts out, if you feed in half a volt, you’ll get 50 volts. Then hook a speaker up to the high voltage output, and feed audio into the control pin, and you’ll have amplified audio. You can then control the overall volume by changing how much voltage goes into the high voltage side. Today, it works the same way, but with transistors instead of tubes.",
"It's what is known in electrical engineering as an allpass filter. Think of an audio signal as being represented by a bunch of numbers. They can be zero, positive, or negative. Zero represents total silence, and when a number is positive or negative, the farther away from zero it is, the louder it is. Don't bother right now with the difference between positive and negative. An allpass filter just multiplies every number in the signal by a certain amount, called the gain. So everything gets multiplied farther away from zero when you make it louder or closer when you make it softee. When you turn the volume knob, you're telling the radio to adjust that gain.",
"The sound which is converted into electricity drives the speakers. More electric power in the loudspeakers moves the speaker membranes more, so they push more air, for louder sound. (Loudspeakers have coils through which electricity flows. And they have magnets. And these both attract, or push. The stronger the electricity (aka sound flowing through the speaker coil), the more does the magnet push or pull the speaker membrane with the coil. (More power = stronger magnetic field = loudspeaker moves more and pushes more air) If you turn down the volume, there is less electricity going to the speaker, the speaker moves less, for softer sound.",
"How about why does the volume knob in my Jeep sometimes turn the volume up when I turn the knob down, but the volume buttons on the back of the steering wheel work just fine?"
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9s4f7a | how does a wifi signal travel and why does it get weaker as more people are using it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. A wifi signal is just a radio wave - a form of electromagnetic radiation. There's a TON of different technologies involved that essentially allow for data transfer, error correction, etc etc etc which is well outside the scope of an ELI5. 2. The signal itself really shouldn't get weaker as more people use it except in extremely specific and unusual situations and even then, not enough to notice. It may get slower, but that's typically due to limited bandwidth on whatever ISP connection the router/access point is using or some other infastructure-related bottleneck as opposed to anything to do with the signal strength.",
"A WiFi signal is a 2.5GHz or 5GHz (gigahertz) signal in the electromagnetic spectrum. The only other direct experience you would have with any electromagnetic signals would be sight, and your eyes interpret signals in the THz (terahertz) range as color. That is 1000 times higher frequency than WiFi signals. At lower frequency, the signals can travel through solid objects better. When you connect to WiFi, you don’t “use up” the signal nor does it become weaker. However, you do consume bandwidth, and emit the same frequency back to the router to send data back, so that does slow down the network for anyone else using it. As an analogy, you wouldn’t yell at your neighbor to stop sun tanning because she is “using up all the sun and making it weaker for everyone else”."
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9s7fbj | Where do permanently deleted computer files go? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nowhere, they are just unindexed. The path to them is erased, and the space they were occupying is freed to be written over",
"URL_0 Hello, Vsauce here (not really just quoting) How does a computer forget? Moving a file to the trash is just the beginning. To protect against accidental deletion, when thrown in the trash a file remains on your computer in a temporary directory, a sort of purgatory, where it awaits a more ultimate deletion but can be resurrected if you wish. When you empty the trash you are warned that you cannot undo the action. But when you empty the trash, the physical space inhabited by the file isn't actually emptied. It's marked as empty. Available if and when new data needs to be stored somewhere. The file's home has become available real estate but the file itself hasn't moved out. Only the pointers have gone away. Pointers are another type of data on your drive that point to places in memory where the actual file they are referencing can be found. They're a bit like the table of contents, which means that on most operating systems deleting a file and emptying the trash is like deleting a chapter from a book by turning to the table of contents and marking the chapter as empty. There's nothing here, do what you want with the pages. To a computer reading the table of contents it looks like the space is empty but of course that doesn't change the fact that the contents of the chapter are still there. Special data recovery tools look through memory marked empty available to see what's actually there. If you're lucky, they can even find a file and save it, bring it back mark it not available, undeleted. But if some of the file has already been overwritten, there can be problems. The file can be corrupted, melded together with other data like some kind of digital Frankenstein's monster. [my additions bellow] Once the space where the file was has been completely overwritten, then it’s gone permanently. Some operating systems allow you to “Securely Erase” or empty your junk bin. For example on a Mac, if you hold down option after right clicking the junk bin, an option to securely erase the files appears. The disk space is then overwritten with random data. That means it’s gone forever. In some cases, computer forensics can extract data even from overwritten spaces. That is why in high-tech companies where data security is important, hard disks are destroyed in special machines before they are disposed."
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9s8i93 | Why do only fingers work on touchscreens? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The screens are capacitive, so it can detect a voltage change where you touch. Other things like our fingers should also work. Like a sausage."
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9s8lq3 | Why does the "turn it off and on" solution generally work in so many instances? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We’ve landed people on the moon but still haven’t figured out how to make a router that just works....",
"IT Support here. On a desktop computer many issues can be caused by a failed service or program library file and it's just easier to \"reset\" all of them by rebooting a computer to clear the volatile memory and reset the services/files. Computer boots up to a \"fresh\" start."
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9s8pln | Why is shutting off my computer by holding down the power button bad for it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Actual ELI5: Because the programs are busy doing things, and if you click shut down they get a chance to finish what they are doing. If you hold the power button down they get cut off in the middle, which can mess things up if they are doing something important.",
"Oftentimes, a button shutdown operates via a logic switch, not a true \"on/off\" switch and can just shut down the computer in seconds instead of the full time it needs to properly shut down. Think about it like this: it's kind of like the difference between putting physical files away in a file cabinet properly and just opening a drawer and shoving everything in, no matter where it goes. It can fragment files (put things in the wrong places), misallocate free space (wait a minute, this drawer is supposed to be empty), and on a physical hard drive (SSDs are a little better due to no mechanical parts), it can lead to corrupted files (I can't use this! It's all wadded up!) and physical damage to the actual hard drive. By doing a \"logical\" shutdown, meaning click \"start,\" click \"shut down,\" and allowing the computer to do the full process, it's basically like if you clean up a physical office and files after you use them. The computer knows where everything is, and files are less likely to be damaged or corrupted.",
"Data (state of objects, which is VERY important) doesn't get synced to disk, so what can happen is that the states of things can be stored in an inconsistent/invalid state according to the design of those objects. Also your machine could be in the middle of writing SUPER important things like the changes to the operating system itself to the disk. Imagine if someone was creating you and halfway through they just stopped."
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9s9t0m | Graphics Cards | I was thinking about how this chip about 6 inches long and an inch thick can process an entire digital world at 100+ frames per second, and it is just mind boggling, I don't understand how it does it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's the whole card. The chip itself is much smaller than that, probably an inch square at most! But to do this, pretty much it needs to be highly-specialized for just this task. Have you ever heard the term \"jack of all trades, master of none?\" That's what your regular CPU is, it's good at a bit of everything but *absolutely stellar* at almost nothing. But a GPU doesn't need to do all the stuff a CPU does, it just needs to do some specific types of math and be able to push what it figures up out to a display, so that's what it is designed to do. Just like a Swiss Army Knife (the CPU) can provide all sorts of handy little functions, but a proper knife will probably cut better, a proper screwdriver will turn screws better, so on. To this end, inside that chip is absolute tons of *eeeexxtreeeeeemely* small components and electrical paths. But they skip the parts about needing to perform certain functions it doesn't need to do, and uses that space to pile in even more circuits for what it *does* need to do. A common approach is to make as much as possible parallel. For example, let's say a quad-core CPU is like four people doing math problems, let's slow things down and say each can complete one problem per second. So in one second, you get four problems solved. But in a GPU with its 1024 CUDA (for nVidia) cores, you could be doing over 1000 problems in that same second if each could only solve one per second (in reality, it is many times more than that!). Further to this is onboard RAM. The GPU has a lot of shapes to figure out, lighting to do, textures to remember, and all that. It has a lot of thinking muscle in its \"brain,\" but that brain needs to be able to remember a lot of stuff. They *could* use the RAM already installed in your computer, but talking to that RAM is much slower than having it right there. Kinda like having a filing cabinet right next to you, compared to having it down the hall. But in reality, the hardware is only half the magic. The software does a lot of magic of its own to be able to tell the hardware what to do! And there are many, *many* little shortcuts slipped into both to save the GPU precious processing power. For example, let's go with Skyrim. Well if you're looking at a mountain off in the distance, it doesn't need a high-resolution texture loaded like if you were right at the base of it right? A low-res one, made to be small off in the distance, would still appear very nice. Or the trees hidden behind that mountain, you don't even get to see those trees because of the mountain right? So it doesn't draw them to begin with. Lighting from A torch around 3 corners? Why calculate that light when it can't be seen? A myriad of little shortcuts programmed in the software and built into the hardware to make it the leanest, meanest machine it can be."
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9s9zeg | How does Google's 'image search' work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For a long time it was simply looking for the search terms in text, as normal, and then just pulling out the images that appeared on those pages. Basically pictures of apples, say, are likely to appear on pages about apples. (Side note: this is why those \"if we upvote this post enough, so-and-so will show up in the image search for 'coward'\"-type campaigns can actually sometimes work.) I am not sure how much machine learning is incorporated into the image search today (if at all) to actually interpret the images. But the technology to do so is progressing quite rapidly.",
"Someone else will surely know more, but one of the things google does is simplify the image into blocks of colors and tones, to narrow down the possible matches."
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9saau3 | Why do the official movies look different from the videos/movies we make from our personal devices? | Whenever we watch a movie at cinemas or on our home screens, we can easily distinguish whether it is a professional video or a personal video. How it's done? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There’s a lot that goes into it. The composition of the image, frame rate it’s shot at, color grading, etc. However one of the biggest giveaways is lighting. Lighting is incredibly critical in how your image looks. There are some really cool videos out there that talk about this subject. It’s wild how much lighting affects every visual aspect of a video. Lighting for films is purposeful, often utilizing different equipment specifically set up for the one shot. However, when you typically shoot something on your phone just to capture a video, the lighting is just whatever is there and often times not the best set up to get a great image. You can make great high quality films with your phone though! If you’re interested, I’d recommend checking out mobile filmmaking. I’m a big proponent of it and believe that not having expensive gear should ever be someone’s excuse for not making a film. (Also check out the movie Tangerine) There’s so much else that goes into filmmaking that affects the overall visual quality and doesn’t cost a whole lot, such as practicing good light techniques! (Grab yourself some cheap lamps and bounce cards and you can do A LOT!)"
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9sc94v | Why are the clocks on appliances always wrong? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because you set it wrong? I don't understand the question. In fact as out appliances get smarter this is less likely to be true."
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9scje0 | How to power supply splitters actually work? | So just say for example you had a 9v DC power supply, it would deliver those 9v to a device you had connected to it. How does a cable that allows you to split off into multiple outputs supply power to multiple devices if it's just from originally one 9v plug? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It creates a 9 volt potential difference at the output, any number of multiple devices can use that. However if the total current that would be drawn is greater than the supply can provide, the output voltage will drop until the current matches what can be provided. Ohm's Law will be obeyed taking into account the internal resistance of the various components of the network.",
"Here is 1 way to look at it, voltage will constantly stay the same around your circuit and is dropped over various stages relating to the resistance, that is why in a series circuit (where each item is connected one after the other before connecting back to the battery), 3 bulbs of equal power will drop equal amount of voltages which in your case of a 9 volt supply would be 3 volts at eaxh bulb. The voltage can be described as the force that pushes the electrons around the circuit, the current is relatable to the amount of electrons that will flow through a specific point in a second and the resistance is the opposing force to the voltage. In your question, a splitter cable would work in parallel so it isn't the voltage that will be dropped for each connection, it is the current that will split. An example of this on a constant power supply (lets say for USB which is 5 volts and usually 2.3 amps) if 1 phone is connected to charge, it will receive all of those 2.3 amps. If I grabbed a splitter cable and connected another phone, it means each device is only receiving 1.15 amps so you could say the phones will take twice as long to charge but the voltage stays the same if I was to measure it at the phones. In reality, we don't operate on a constant power supply. We say a device draws this much power or this many amps. It is limited by the supply so a transformer might be rated up to 5 amps but only draws 2.3 amps to charge my phone. I could theoretically connect another phone using your splitter cable and it will draw a total of 4.6 amps through the transformer circuit, through the cable, splits and then to each phone. I hope this answers your question. Here is a sketch that I was shown that helped me visualise the difference between voltage, current and resistance as well: URL_0"
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9sd346 | With everything we have learned about technology and aerodynamics, why has the land speed record been untouched for 21 years? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is no economic incentive. You can't sell an overengineered car that works best at three times the speed limit. It would just be a science project for fun and giggles. You'd need to get Red Bull to sponsor it.",
"That's the manned land speed record. We can go faster, with the record set at 10385kmh set by an unmanned rocket sled. As to why we aren't working on faster manned vehicles, there is very little to be learned. We know how to go fast, we know how to stick to the ground, and we know how humans react to the forces in question.",
"You also have to take into account the wheel composition. At such speeds it's very easy for even the slightest imbalance to cause a catastrophic failure.",
"Safety standards and potential loss of life. Not too many people are willing to fund such risk.",
"Because it’s enormously expensive to do so. The current project to try and break it - Bloodhound SSC - needs further funding of £25million and have appointed administrators earlier this month to try and help with that, else the current attempt will fail because of lack of funding. URL_0",
"While with new technology I'm sure we could break it just seems pointless. Its impractical and we've already done something really similar. Why don't we break this record or that record? Just because we can? Generally scientists work under a grant meaning someone is funding them money to do something. Almost always its to discover something that can make a profit but in the few other cases, its to benefit the scientific community. This probably wouldn't do either of those and it would cost a hell of a lot of money. Eventually at some point when technology gets good enough that it isn't particularly hard to break the record someone will probably do it as a publicity stunt or as an ad for a product, but until then, well I wouldn't hold my breath.",
"Because it's really hard to go faster than sound on the ground. At that speed, flying's actually easier and more efficient. Breaking the sound barrier was an awesome engineering feat, of no real practical value. Going faster still, just to get in a recordbook, is simply too expensive, dangerous, and difficult."
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9sde3t | Why do 720p videos look worse on 720p monitors than 1080p videos? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Even if you have a 720p video file, there still is compression taking away some video quality. 1080p, you're simply starting with a larger file and more data to create a more accurate final image."
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9sexyy | Why do some speakers have an very broad frequency response? | Some loudspeakers have a response of 25 to like 25.000 or higher. But why, as humans are not able to hear anything above 20.000. Especially considering the older you get the lower this maximum frequency becomes. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sound engineer here. Frequency response reaching beneath our hearing range might be beneficial mainly because of two reasons 1. Frequency response isn’t a stiff limitation. E.g. 25 - 25000 Hz means the speaker is capable of reproducing the sound in that range within a given margin (usually 3 dBs). It means, for example, it will reproduce 27000 Hz (27 kHz) but it will be 4.5 dB quieter (softer) than it should be compared to the level of sounds in the 25 - 25000 Hz range. So the extended frequency response usually mean better (more ‘flat’) response in the most important range. 2. Reproduction of fast transients - very ‘quick’, snappy sounds like a snare drum or acoustic guitar strum. Even though we can’t really hear a sound of 25 kHz, it is possible to hear a subtle difference in the attack of this kind of sounds. It means that the speaker is able to act “quicker” than a speaker going up to only 20 kHz. This is also the reason why we record sound in high sample frequencies (like 192 kHz). It’s another topic, but it lets us record frequencies up to 96 kHz - while it’s waaaay above hearing range, the subtle difference is there.",
"Basically if you make a tweeter that's accurate to near 20khz, it will probably be accurate a bit above that as well. Even if they only designed it with 20k in mind, if the specs end up better of course they'll quote them as such, it's good marketing."
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9sf3sn | How can a battery know when it is being changed or discharged? And how can it be charged AND discharged at the same time? Ej.: Mobile phone. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you plug in the charger, the phone battery isn't being charged and discharged at the same time. The phone is running off the charger and the battery is getting charged The charger provides 5 volts, the battery is at 3.7 volts, and the circuitry in the phone runs at 1.8-3.3 volts. There are DC-DC converters between the charger input and the battery and the phone circuits which make sure the right power is provided to each part. The one between the charger and the battery can notify your phone that it has voltage on it's input and is now charging the battery. When you unplug the charger it stops reporting it has voltage and stops trying to charge"
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9sfjyv | How do/did mood rings work? | I always wondered this since I was a kid. Do they actually work? Does it like read your heart beat or something? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"short answer- they don't Longer answer- they are filled with a liquid crystal that changes colors based on temperature. As your body heats/cools, that temperature change also heats/cools the metal of the ring, which heats/cools the liquid crystals inside the ring.",
"It changes color depending on body temperature. If you put your hands in cold water it’ll change."
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9sg769 | Why did it take so long to start making cars that turned off their lights when the car turned off? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Without the electronics being computer-controlled it becomes difficult to essentially turn off the light with a timer that starts when the car is turned off. It'd be easy to just turn the lights off automatically when the car is off but there's cases where you might want to keep the lights on without the keys in the ignition."
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9shncw | Why do 2 sticks of ram need to be the same when being used in twin ports? Why wouldnt two different sticks work the same? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They *may* work but dissimilar sticks will be limited in performance to the slower of the two. By having the same kind in paired ports you can avoid losing some of the potential performance. It is best practice to put in the same kind of memory so the timing and speed are the same."
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9sjm20 | How do coax cables work? | How can do much information be transferred on a cable that only has two signal wires? literally hundreds of channels over one cable. I tried doing some quick research on it, but I couldn’t really find anything? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The same way that a single speaker on a stereo can play for you the output of a whole orchestra of instruments, plus voices / chorus. Waves [add up]( URL_0 ) to each other. For coax cable, the inner wire is shielded by the outer mesh (sometimes double-shielded (2 meshes)), and thus can carry radio and microwave frequencies without loss. At the transmission end, each channel has its own frequencies, and it's just a matter of combining them all into one compound signal. At the receiving end, your TV can \"tune\" into only a single frequency, resonating to that frequency and ignoring the rest. To continue the similarity with the speaker system, [this article]( URL_1 ) discusses wave interference, and you can see in the pictures how combining two waves can result in a single complex wave.",
"Coax cable is weird and is built explicitly for carrying high frequency electrical signals. The outer shield is grounded and the center wire changes voltage. There is an insulator of precise dimensions and properties wrapped around the center wire so that the coax cable forms a good transmission channel. You basically end up sending radio waves down the cable. If you try to send slowly changing signals down it it won't do great, and if you try to send high frequency signals down something like a normal RCA cable you're going to get a lot of noise and garbage. Coax cable effectively lets two antennas talk to each other through a cable instead of the air. As for how they get so many different channels, its just like the old days where each channel had a frequency. Since each channel is on a different carrier frequency, you can separate out the carrier that you want and then pull the signal for the channel off of that. That's how we handle data transfer for most things with antennas. As long as you don't have two channels on two frequencies that are too close together you can pick out the information you wanted."
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9sjnfn | 3D Printers | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine a hot glue gun being used to build an object, let’s say an igloo. You initially take the hot glue and make an starting layer (a circle), then let it cool, and make the next layer of glue (a circle over that circle) and so on and so forth until you end up with an igloo made of hot glue. Well a basic extrusion 3D printer works the same way, simply with a more precise extrusion head (glue gun), finer material and filaments (the glue sticks) and better control system (your hand/arm).",
"Like you're 5? When you do a poo, how it swirls around and around piling ontop of itself to make something bigger? You're 3d printing right there :) Now imagine if you did that accurately with melted plastic.",
"A printer shoots droplets of ink, line by line, at a page, until the whole page is covered. A 3D printer shoots (melted) plastic instead of ink. And once it's done with a layer (and the plastic has hardened), it starts over and shoots another layer of plastic droplets on top of it. Basically it's like building the pyramids, from the bottom, out of melted plastic instead of rocks. You just go up layer by layer and it's possible to leave spaces inside for all the tunnels and secret rooms. A 3D printer can make relatively complex objects, including objects that are hollow or have chambers inside, out of plastic. 3D printers are used because nowadays (and actually for quite a while now) things are designed on the computer in [CAD - Computer-Aided Design software]( URL_0 ), and since the computer already has all the specifications saved to engineering precision, it's sometimes useful to \"print\" out the thing, as a plastic model, to show the boss or whatever.",
"Imagine building a lego sculpture. there is an instruction sheet that you must follow, and you have different colored legos. You follow the instructions, slowly building up and up until your sculpture is complete. A 3d printer works in much the same way. instead of lego’s, the printer melts little bits of plastic that dry quickly. It moves its head around to build up the same way as you would build with legos. In this case, the instruction book is a special set of instructions created from a 3d model. This is created with software that comes with the printer. If i’m not mistaken, some printers can hold several colors at once, and some printers need to manual labor to change the colors"
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9sjy5v | When it's worth for telecom to invest in FTTH or FTTB? | In what areas? What's the difference between the two? I heard FTTB is cheaper. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"FTTH is Fiber to the Home, and FTTB is Fiber to the Building. Generally speaking, FTTH is going to go to single-family homes while FTTB will deliver service to a shared building. While there are a lot of variables to take into account, Fiber to the Building is basically going to be cheaper to deploy and turn up because there is less individual fiber being used or installed. The general FTTx architecture these days is known as a Passive Optical Network, which is a fancy way of saying that they stick a splitter in a box and everyone shares the signal. In FTTH, that splitter is going to be in a cabinet somewhere near your home, but the ISP still has to run dedicated fiber(s) to your home over the last few thousand feet. That's a lot of work and it costs money to do that work. In FTTB, you basically get to stick the splitter within a few hundred feet and have dedicated ducts for connecting the fiber up to all of the offices or apartments you're trying to serve. This lowers the ISP's costs significantly. In short, when you're turning up fiber infrastructure the higher the density you're serving the cheaper it is to turn it up."
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9sm8kb | how do TV and radio stations get viewer counts | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Using statistics. A representative sample of a country's population either get asked to keep a record of what they watch or listen to or have devices in their TVs or radios that do this. This information is gathered and the figures are scaled up to the whole country. EDIT: grammar",
"A while ago I had a device that I had to take with me whenever I was driving or sitting watching TV. Each channel apparently has a sound frequency that is inaudible to human ears but the device I wore could pick it up and tell what channel/station I was watching/listening to. I was compensated for the hard work of doing what I was doing anyways. It was nice.",
"Actually, this explains a lot better: URL_0 Basically they use a device on your TV or radio and count it. Back in the days they used to pay people to keep a diary of things. But you know how that files. So they started installing small device to the TV and when you tune to channel they can count it. These days it's built in to your set top box so it's much easier to track."
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9sm8yl | How does a cut-off system determine the duration it layed turned off? | Let's say you shutdown your pc at 12 o'clock. It has no LAN connection etc. You unplug it completely, wait an hour, set it back up, boot it and voila 13 o'clock. & #x200B; How does this work? Everytime I unplug my alarm or remove the batteries from my calculator it just resets the time. Is there some hidden, analog clock inside my pc? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yeah. There is indeed a chip in the computer that is constantly powered from a battery, that keeps track of time. I'm sure you know that most advanced calculators got a memory-preserving battery, so that it won't forget everything immediately if the system batteries run out. It's the same with the computer, except that battery is hard to get to. You barely ever need to replace it in a decently new computer.",
"Yes, indeed. For adults: it is called real time clock. Inside the PC is a tiny battery located somewhere over the mainboard. It is so small, that it provides only enough energy to let vital tasks of the PC run. This battery is connected to a tiny circuit running a clock. That circuit draws so less energy requiring the replacement of the the battery only every 10 years or even further. This make that battery barely noticed by the consumer, so that most people think there is none. An alarm could also have one. But since most alarm clock already have batteries it would be inconvenient to implement such a battery among with the other batteries needed. Edit: add explanation for alarm clock"
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9sohjg | Why can't we rebuild machines from the space race? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"With enough money you could. Some of the original parts and materials would be quite difficult to source though, they were often custom made and the equipment used to fabricate them is long gone. Many of the components are obsolete, unsafe, or simply needlessly heavy/expensive. In the race to out-rocket the USSR the safety and economics were often afterthoughts, and the devices used to do it are pretty raw. Rebuilding them per the original specifications would be purely a conservation effort, they have no place as actual spacecraft anymore.",
"* We can. * We don't want to. * It would cost a lot of money. * It would not serve much of a purpose.",
"We can't afford it. You're no doubt talking about the F-1 rocket engine from the Saturn-V, there are many YouTube videos about it. It was a marvel of mechanical engineering, the 27 jeweled Swiss Watch of giant rocket motors. We don't do things like that anymore because it's much too expensive, not because engineers don't love Steampunk. We have digital watches because they cost $5 and don't have to be wound up every day. The skills used to build the F-1 aren't used anymore because we have CAD and CNC machines that can make shapes that were impossible during the Saturn era. Today the goal for all access-to-space projects is low cost per pound. That gives you solutions like the SpaceX remote controlled reusable rocket, something the Saturn guys wouldn't have even considered because of its complexity."
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9sohtg | How do some companies have authority to sell and manage internet domains when the internet isn't owned by anyone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"So, every device that accesses the internet, be it a server, a computer, a cellphone, etc, has a numerical address. If you knew the numerical address of a website, you could reach that website through the numerical address. The trouble is that numerical addresses aren't very convenient. So in 1983 a service called DNS (Domain Name System) was created. Basically, DNS is a great big database of numerical addresses with corresponding web addresses. So when you type in URL_0 it takes you to Reddit, and you don't need to know Reddit's numerical address. Companies that sell a domain name aren't selling you part of the internet. They are registering your domain in DNS. There's a non-profit organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that takes care of DNS, and they allow third party companies to register websites in DNS. The companies pay ICANN a fee to be able to provide this service, and they charge their customers to pass on the fee. Does that help?",
"As mentioned by others part of the business model is to be a middleman. However most also host the website. They provide space on a server for the website interface, instead of you hosting it on your own machine. This means you don't have to do backups, maintenance, and other hardware work yourself. They also offered help with basic website setup and design.",
"Well someone has to maintain a list of who owns what and their contact info. This costs money. There are nonprofit organizations(icann) that control things like tld assignments (com net uk). Then companies like network solutions, GoDaddy etc (registrars) get accredited by icann so they're included in the global list of domains. They pay a small fee to icann for this. There's really nothing to stop someone from creating their own registration and DNS, it just wouldn't work for anyone who doesn't have that info."
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9sqal9 | Why is it usually recommended that brand new phones be used until the battery is low before fully charging it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In the past, old-school rechargeable batteries had a limited number of “charge cycles”. If you charged up your battery, by any amount, it would start to degrade and it’s total capacity would drop. Modern batteries still have charge cycles, but the number of cycles they can endure is so great that it’s no longer an issue. What is an issue with modern lithium batteries is actually letting the charge go low. A study showed that batteries drained to 0 can lose 30% of their charge capacity after 300-500 charge cycles, while batteries kept above 60% had no visible decrease after 2500 charge cycles. You should charge your phone whenever possible. You don’t need to worry about overcharging, which was a concern back when we used Ni-Cd batteries. Lithium batteries are designed to trickle-charge when near full capacity and never overcharge. Lithium batteries are superior to old school rechargeable batteries in almost every way. Problems your parents had with rechargeables have become obsolete, and advice which was true 10 years ago is also obsolete. Lithium batteries do have a weakness compared to older rechargeable batteries - they can only operate in a very narrow temperature range. High heat and freezing cold can cause the battery to explode or stop working."
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9suemw | What makes older games (specifically games like Fallout: New Vegas) so incompatible with current operating systems like Windows 10? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Libraries, Registry Keys and Screen Resolution would be the main offenders, also, OS changes a lot from a version to another, it's more noticiable if you are more of and advanced user (support engineer, computer programmer and stuff like this). System and CPU architecture (x64 and x32) are also a huge factor for older games.",
"New Vegas runs well on steam under windows 10 on my computer, so I'm a bit confused here. Usually, the OS is not the problem in these cases, but the hardware is. Hardware evolves a lot and the game is unable to communicate properly with it. This is why you have to use emulators to play really old games, the emulator acts like an interface between the game and your modern hardware, allowing them to communicate with each other"
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9sxdmm | When planes crash, how do most black boxes survive? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine carrying a rock on a flight, and then going through the rubble of the crash to find the rock. That rock is going to probably be fine. Black boxes are stronger than rocks.",
"They're made of nothing but very strong components. By international law, flight recorders have to be able to crash from 500kph to 0 in 45 cm and still be fully recoverable.",
"Firstly the flight recorders are incased in layers of steel and foam to protect it from any impact or fire. In addition the recording is done on media which can be read even if slightly damaged and exposed to the elements. Early flight recorders scratched lines into metal foil but now they use magnetic tape. Even if a flight recorder is shredded into small bits and put in salt water for months the magnetic tape still holds information and can be pieced together by investigators.",
"Planes need to be light in weight, so they can fly in the air. Cue, Aluminum..... Black boxes, though, they are much smaller and can be made with the strongest things with the purpose to record and be strong. They are also painted in orange so that it is easy to find them. Also, the technical term for Black boxes is Flight Recorders.",
"If you built the entire plan like a black box, it wouldn't be a plane anymore, it would be a tank. If you take a really TOUGH plane that can still fly, accelerate it and its contents up to 300MPH and 50,000 feet then let it freefall, whenever it stops, the contents of the plan (including its passengers and cargo) were falling at the same rate. They also stop rapidly, so from their perspective in zeroG(ish) freefall, you basically just hit them with an entire planet at 300MPH. Now of all the thing on that plane, really only one is capable of surviving that kind of impact, followed by fire and\\\\or deep submersion for prolonged periods under salt water. The blackbox. Plans, fragile by design to fly effectively. Humans, fragile by evolution, not designed to withstand such forces. Blackbox, \"we got you fam.\"",
"Another question would be (imo): Why do we need to find black boxes in these days. Why aren't planes sending this data also nonstop via satellites to a secure storage that doesn't fly with 1000km/h through the air. At least we would know the exact coordinates of where a plane hit the water instead of 'owh it gone from our radar' ats-b doesn't count, not enough coverage, not enough frequency, no voicerecordings.",
"A while ago there was an article in Flying Magazine on what they do to test black boxes: * Fire it from a cannon at a brick wall * Point flamethrowers at it for an hour or so * Put it in an oven for 24 hours * Put in salt water at simulated depth for two weeks These times are most certainly not quite correct, the article was some time ago.",
"They are small and can therefore be made very sturdy. You can make anything survive a crash with enough reinforcement if the content of said box doesn't mind being rapidly deaccelerated.",
"They're placed in the far back surrounded by layers of collision padding and fireproofing. Also, most pilots don't want to die and therefore try to slow the crash down as much as they can by pulling up just before impact. The planes that do a nosedive straight into the ground or sea rarely have their black boxes survive.",
"The kids who were awesome at the egg drop contest grew up and were given a bigger budget for essentially the same problem.",
"The black box is typically in the rear of the plane, so in most accidents, it will suffer from less impact. They are also designed to withstand up to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour and upwards to 3000 times the force of gravity.",
"You put your phone in a case to prevent it from taking the hard hit from the ground. Another example is those \"egg container\" contests where they put an egg inside and drop it from like 30 feet. The goal is to insulate the egg so it won't break. Black boxes are like SUPER ULTRA CASES that are built around recording devices that are designed to take really hard hits. Special insulation, shock-absorbing materials, sturdy recording equipment, etc.",
"Black boxes have a lot of crash protection, like rubber and Kevlar and stuff like that. Layers on layers of it. With the advent of flash technology, black boxes are harder to break because they don't have moving parts any more. Black boxes are also bright orange-red by the way, and not black.",
"Black boxes actually very often don't survive. However, the black box itself is not the interesting part; it's the recording medium inside that you care about. And that medium is encased in an extremely strong container that can withstand most impacts itself. Additionally, the black boxes are mounted in the aft section of the plane, just before the horizontal stabilisers. This is the section of the plane most likely to stay partially in-tact.",
"In addition to being made out of amazing material that is very resilient, the “black boxes” are stored in the tail of the aircraft. This can help in some cases as the forward sections of the aircraft will absorb some impact before the tail section. This isn’t true in every case, but I’ve seen plenty of air crash pictures where the fuselage is highly damaged and only the tail is recognizable.",
"Watch Aircraft Disaster series. What you will notice is all too often they do NOT survive intact. Rather they protected the actual data storage enough for it to be recoverable.",
"On top of what everyone is saying about them being super strong and waterproof, they are stored at the tail end of the plane, so they rarely receive the brunt of the impact.",
"Follow up question, does the black box need to be wiped to make more storage after a certain number of flights? Do they replace the storage device or just it just record over itself?",
"So the black box is made from extremely strong metal & foam like a pillow! It’s typically located in the rear of the plane most crashes impact forward of the vertical stabilizer! So when the plane crashes it is protected!",
"A combination of being in the tail of the plane which sees less damage and impact forces and being made to resist water, fire, and impact forces. They actually are often damaged and sometimes not able to give full data to investigators."
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9sxyr5 | Aggregation or Composition | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All the text books will tell you exactly the same as /u/brazzy42 - composition means the child objects can't exist by themselves, aggregation means they *can* exist by themselves. But there is an important piece of the puzzle that's missing: **the choice depends, partly, on business context**. For example, a car has an engine. We'd normally think of that as composition - the engine can't exist without the car. But if the application you're designing is for an engine factory, then an engine *can* exist without a car, and so it would be aggregation in this scenario. So yes - composition means the child objects can't exist by themselves, but it has to be viewed in the context of the application."
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9sy5b4 | When a website loads incorrectly what are the common reasons? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Information from a website is downloaded and requests for data when and where is uploaded. There is always some loss in information back and forth, but most the times it isn’t noticeable. If when talking to what ever server is hosting the web page the connection has enough data loss, usually to an interruption in connection it gathers the information it does have and presents it as the website. Sometimes it’s the code that has the dimensions of what goes where, sometimes it’s important visual files that act as the skin of the site. Reloading will fix those issues, if connection is good, and you reload it might be the format of the website is not compatible with your internet browser",
"What it all comes down to, technically, is “bad programming”. A website might use a mixture of CSS and JavaScript to apply styles and handle the spacing/sizing of different elements (parts) of the page. This might work perfectly on the developer’s laptop, but what if you have an adblocker enabled that stops the JS from loading? Or what if the browser you’re using doesn’t understand some of the CSS rules? There are countless other reasons of course, including the CSS/JS/HTML files not being loaded correctly or being corrupted. Also CSS is sometimes very browser specific, and what works perfectly in several different ones might not work in one specific one (I’m looking at you Internet Explorer). Most people don’t use older browsers any more, but some do, so as a developer you have to decide if it’s worth the time and effort to accommodate all of those ancient (legacy) browsers."
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9syna0 | What are some of the basic things an audiophile should know? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Learn the difference between open and closed headphones. Honestly that’s one of the only real specs that will truly affect your listening experience. If you’re going for speakers, then pay attention to your room dimensions and how you place your speakers. Most audiophile culture is frankly a rip off, but there are a few things that will make a lasting difference"
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9szc6f | Why does hold music always have terrible quality when you can hear the person at the other end of the phone perfectly fine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phone systems are optimised for voice communication and clip frequencies that are higher or lower than usually occur in the human voice. Music often has harmonic frequencies that get lost. Add to this that hold music is often over-compressed to save memory space in the system.",
"As I recall, phones will only record and transmit sounds in the \"normal\" vocal range. They cut off some of the high and low parts of what you say. (I don't remember exactly why, presumably due to hardware or transmission limitations.) that's why you sound a bit different over the phone. When you do this to music, it kind of ruins it. Source: I read it somewhere a few years ago",
"Phone is focusing mainly on the ranges of the human voice. Anything higher pitch or lower pitch gets cut off for better hearing of the human voice. So your only hearing the mid range-ish part of the music."
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9t52y8 | Why were bits the powers of 2 and not something like 10? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The top comments explain what a bit is, but not why it is base 2, and not some other arbitrary number. In transistors, the power is either on or off. 1 or 0. In order to have a 3 bit or greater computing system, you would need to measure *how much* electrical charge the transistor holds, as opposed to whether or not it has a charge. While that in and of itself wouldn’t be too difficult, as transistors degrade overtime, those partial electrical charges (that you’d need to accurately measure to determine what value it holds), would become inaccurate. It’s much easier to read on/off, than try and read partial electrical charges. EDIT: as several comments have pointed out, it is not simply on or off, but low charge and high charge. Think of a full cup of water. It might not be 100% full to the brim, but you can still call it full. This is on. Now dump out the water. There are still some drops and dribbles of water, however you can say for all intents and purposes that the cup is empty (off). Yes, there’s still some “charge” in there, but for our purposes, we can call that empty.",
"ELYA5: Its easier to tell whether a light bulb is on or off (base 2) than it is to tell how bright it is (base 3+). For each bit there's either something there (1) or there isn't (0). Imagine you're filing out a paper form. You write 6 in one of the boxes but it gets mistaken for 8. The 'check all that apply' boxes don't have this problem because you could mark them in any way (X, ✔, etc.) since you're only checking if there's something in the checkbox or not. As the paper gets worn out, your writing gets illegible but it's still easy to tell whether a checkbox is marked.",
"Okay, something everybody is missing is that sure, bits are on-off voltages. So, really just fast switches. But the reason is how we build computer logic. The basis for all logic circuits is the NAND operator. It turns out with just NANDs, you can do all other binary logic operators. NAND is Not-AND, so if the two inputs are on the output is off, otherwise the output is on. In other words, binary logic produces binary results. You can feed the result into another NAND operator. And because you can make any operation out of just NAND operators, it means you can use just billions of copies of the one tool, and do everything you want with it. Now, think of base 10.. adding a digit of 0-9 (say 9 voltages), to another digit, you can get 19 results (0-18) that you would need to test for. How can you feed that into another similar addition operator? Edit: inputs need to be on for NAND, not the same, sometimes my brain doesn't know what my hands are typing. \"P",
"Well, a bit is specifically a Binary Integer. By definition a bit has only two possible states. If we did not use binary integers to represent information in our computers, then we likely would not refer to information in terms of bits so often. There were many experiments for using different schemes to store information, like bi-quinary and balanced ternary, for example. If you want to know why we settled on bits, well, that's a long and convoluted story, and I'd be surprised if anyone knew most of the details. The two most important parts of it, however, involve two men: George Boole and Claude Shannon. 1. George Boole's work on Boolean Algebra gave us a robust way to simplify complicated ideas into webs of yes/no questions. Answer the initial questions with whatever yes/no data you have, follow the results to each subsequent question, and at the end you'll have some answer. 2. Claude Shannon realized that evaluating Boolean expressions could be automated with relay switches, the electro-mechanical devices telecoms used to make sure signals got where they needed to go. Shannon's insight paved the way for the development of modern computing hardware by showing us that Boolean Algebra was a good and flexible model for automated computing. And as time passed bits won out over more exotic representations of information because Boolean Algebra was a more mature field. More work had been done on it, and more people knew how to reason about it.",
"The top comment right now talks about how reading an on/off voltage is easier. Another reason is because mathematical systems for base 2 math is really easy. We know that 5 + 2 = 7. In binary, that is 101 + 10 = 111. Subtracting is just adding with a neat trick called the two’s complement. Multiplying is also fairly simple. If we wanted 2 x 5 = 10, in binary that is 10 x 101 = 1010. This works by adding 10x1 + 100x0 + 1000x1 = 1010. This is shifting the two (10) over one spot every time and seeing if there is a one or a zero in that spot for the five (101). Dividing is more of a guess and check system that resembles converting from base(10) to base(2). If you skipped over the previous paragraph, it just talked about why it is easy to do math with binary. These are easy to implement mechanically like the first computers and can be done with dominoes! (Look up domino calculator).",
"Because the power of ten requires 10 different ways we can view something. The power of 2 (base 2) is represented as either on (1) or off (0). Also, it isn't necessarily the power of 2. It is just in base 2. The difference being that in base 10( or numbering system) 9 is... well 9. But in base 2, it requires 1x2^3 +0x2^2+0x2^1+1x2^0, or 1001. Hopefully that makes sense.",
"It's easier to determine if a voltage or signal is 'on' or 'off' as opposed to having to give it a specific value",
"A bit has two states, 0 or 1. If it had 10 states, like a numeral (0-9), then it would operate on powers of 10. But it doesn't.",
"There's a PBS documentary somewhere where some of the first guys to put together a computer, like the ENIAC guys or something went down to buy some vacuum tubes and the dude selling them was like \"Which kind you want? \"Which kinds you got!?\" \"Well we got some with 2 states and some with 5 and some with 7 and some with 10 and...\" \"Oh well the 10-state tubes sound the most straightforward. Probably gonna need a few thousand.\" \"The 10-state tubes are five dollars each.\" \"Holy shit! How much are the two-state tubes?\" \"Thirty cents.\" \"We'll take a thousand.\" This is an **actual** story, possibly true, I saw on a history of computing documentary on PBS. If true, I believe this is the real answer regarding why binary and not base-10.",
"It seems like most of these are pragmatic engineering answers, but thinking of bits in purely in terms of physical computers is a mistake. A bit is an abstract entity. A bit has two states, because it makes sense as a fundamental unit of information. Suppose I want to send you a message of a fixed length. I could use decimal digits to transmit the information. The first digit I send you is a 7, eliminating nine tenths of the remaining possibilities of what the message could be. What about base-5 digits? Each digit narrows the possibilities down by four fifths. Using bits cuts the possibilities in half. What if I'm sending you unary digits? In that case, I can't send you any information, since there's only one message of any given length, and you already know what it is (namely, \"1111...1\"). We use bits because the most fundamental unit of information is the one that cuts the possibility space in half, or equivalently, answers a yes or no question. It's useful to think about the act of downloading a movie as a couple of computers playing 20 gigaquestions. After the downloading computer has asked that many questions, it knows what movie the server was talking about.",
"Think of bits like light-switches. They're on, or off. A byte is basically just the \"configuration\" of a row of eight light-switches, 0 being off and 1 being on.",
"I have i feeling that OP wanted to ask why BYTES (not bits) are power of two as in 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit rather than 10 bit, 20 bit, 40 bit etc... I really think that was his question, not why bits have two states",
"A digital input/output in theory is typically: 0 volts = 0 5 volts = 1 In reality the output of a chip pin is never going to be exactly 0 or 5 volts though. The technical specs will dictate what thresholds are allowed, they will look something like: 0-1.2V = 0 1.2-2.5V = invalid 2.5-5V = 1 Pin outputs can vary wildly within these ranges. Now imagine doing that with 10 different voltage levels. You would need some complex circuitry to manage 10 levels of tiny thresholds just to use a different number base.",
"You can have decimal computers. One of the early computers used decimal. This was because it was designed to recreate the functionality of a mechanical calculator that also used decimal. It still works and is at the national computing museum at Bletchley Park (the place famous for wartime decoding) URL_0 To use decimal it used valves called [dekatrons]( URL_1 ) which could handle the 10 states. These were used in telephone exchanges too, to store dialed digits. The reason most computers are binary and thus work well with powers of 2 is simply because transistors working with 2 states, high or low voltage, on or off, etc is easy to do and scale (both up and down) However, the notion of a 'bit' also has a place in information theory, as being the smallest amount of information. The work of Shannon is key to this concept. To represent powers of 10 a computer would need more than 1 bit, but equally bits would go to waste because 3 bits can only represent 8 different states, not enough for decimal, but 4 bits can represent 16 different states. Thus, instead of losing 6 states, computing pioneers adopted hexadecimal, base 16, using the letters A-F alongside the digits 0-9 to represent numbers at a higher abstraction than base 2. So, although it's stated that computers use base 2, for the most part low level programming and programmers are typically working with base 16. Although octal had its place for a while and there are some aspects where you're thinking about things in binary or whether individual bits are set or not. Of course, once you start writing layers of software that humans interact with there are numerous places where we convert a base 2 representation to a base 10 representation. At which point, there's very little need or point to fretting about how numbers are represented by the processor, or stored in ram, or stored on the disk - the latter, for example doesn't store the digits in the same way that RAM would - because long strings of 000000 are difficult to determine and we also add in a bunch of error correction. Same with the way that data is transmitted over wires or wireless. Techniques to compress data also mean that what signals are actually sent differ from those a higher level program would \"see\".",
"See the light switches in your house ? They are either on or off. Computers are made of billions of microscopic switches, call transistors, that can only have two states: on or off. Hence binary.",
"It's *not* always 2-value. The x87 used 4-value cells for the ROM. Most SSDs use 4-value, 8-value, or even 16-value cells. Other N-value cells would be possible but would require more math. HDLs typically have about 9 different values, but only some subset of them are ever meaningful at a given point.",
"Top comments are doing a good job explaining, but I think they’re missing the “5” part of ELI5, so here goes: Binary has *yes* and *no*, which are fast and easy to understand and pass down the line. Decimal has *yes*, *no*, and eight types of *maybe*, which takes more effort to figure out before you can pass it down the line. Sometimes, though, if you really want to pass along fine details, you can use an analog signal (lots of maybes) instead of a digital signal (all yes and no), but you need specially designed parts to do it.",
"Base 2 is in a way the most natural to use. To skip the part with engineering, a bit basically amounts to one answer to a yes/no question. It's the smallest single piece of information you can have. You can't have yes/maybe question or something like that. On the other hand, you could have more information. Like, one answer to a question which has three possible answers. But we don't even have a good way to talk about such a question, like we do with yes/no questions. Like, what are the three options? Sure you can think of some, like if you ask about numbers, more than 0, less than 0 or exactly 0 could work. But you should notice that this immediately feels a lot more awkward than a simple \"yes or no\" question. I don't really know why engineers mostly seem to make things that have two possible states(SSDs notably use base 4 internally though), but I guess at least partially it's because base-2 is so natural for computing and information.",
"Using bits make power of two appears by itself! Let's count on one hand, each finger is a bit, closed is 0 and opened is 1. Did you know you can count up to 31 with a single hand if you do it like a computer? How that work? Well, when you add one, you always add it to the thumb, if the thumb is already 1, it closes and you carry to the index. If the index was also already one, it closes too and you carry to the major. Etc... until you reach the little finger. You get stuck when all the digits are 1 (because then all your digit would close and you would have to carry to the other hand). Start with all your digit closed, that is 0. Now open your thumb, that is 1. Next you close the thumb, and open the index, that is 2. Then you open your thumb again (the index stay open too) that is 3. Then you close both the thumb and the index, and open the major (yes, that one is fun) that is 4. Then open the thumb, that is 5. Etc... You will see that the more you progress, the more time you need to carry to the next finger, and it start back. Well, 5 fingers you can do 0 to 31. 6 fingers is 0 to 63. 7 fingers is 0 to 127. Etc... You see the pattern? With two hands you can count to 1023! And if you are super flexible (I'm not) you could count up to 65,535 with your two hands and your feet."
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9t7lth | How are Open World Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 made in such detail? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Is every square foot of the open world actually created by a programmer\" - not a programmer. For any large game, the asset creation is a major task, and people working on that tend to greatly outnumber the programmers. Good tools can help automate a lot, but still there's a reason why there's 3000 people on RDR2 credits list - it does take a *LOT* of manpower to make games in such detail.",
"Plants, trees, and rocks can be generated programmatically. For instance, SpeedTree is software that automatically generates an infinite variety of tree models. A designer might then start by writing a function that randomly places these trees throughout the world. Then he would rearrange them as he sees fit. Likewise, you could randomly generate terrain and then go in and customize it. So there are some shortcuts that can be taken. Here's an example of someone physically placing each object and sculpting the landscape from scratch. It takes a really long time to do it this way, but I wouldn't doubt that this is more or less how Rockstar did it (because they're crazy and they can afford to): URL_0",
"Games are made in game engines. These are software which allow a streamlined process of creation. A modeler will create a rock in a 3D program; maybe it'll take them an hour. Someone will make the geography of the map, someone will model buildings and trees and fences and grass and everything that goes in a world. Then, everything is put into the engine, where it's assembled. It's much like how a car is made on a production line: hundreds of people all doing their own wee things l, sculpting and painting, coding and testing, and then at the end it's all put together. Like a car, we have now advanced where many things can be done automatically. A game such as Pong would have all been hard coded, but now we have tools for automation. Tools to generate trees and textures, people and clouds, animations and sounds, smoke and explosions. The game engine does a good deal of the heavy lifting. So, with a game like red dead, while most of the objects that are in the game are likely fabricated by real people, but you might find that an area such as a forest has been almost completely generated at random (from the assets people made) with a few tweaks here and there from a real person.",
"Brushes. So many brushes. A lot of macro terrain creation is done through \"sculpting\" a 2D mesh into a basic desired shape. On top of that the vegetation and rocks are \"painted\" (think like a normal Photoshop brush but as you drag it, trees appear rather than a colour). At that point, people will go in and place/tweak things by hand but the bulk of the work is done. Details don't take too long, relatively, when you have 200 people working 10 hours a day for 6 months.",
"Ok so I work as an independant game developer, so maybe I can try to explain it as simply as possible. A video game is made of quite a few main components made by different people with different skills. The 2d and 3d artists make all the graphical elements, like a texture, or a virtual object. It can be a tree, a weapon, a character, anything you SEE in the game. Animators will make objects and characters move, sound designer will make the sound effects. Then all of this is placed into a Game Engine. The Game Engine is like the motherboard of the game. It allows all the different components to work and be displayed together. This is also where the programmers are going to add the code that makes all the components interact the way we want them to. Without the programmers, you could actually move around in the game but everything would be still, there would be nothing to do. Any action you want to accomplish need to be programmed into the game, from simply telling your character that you want to walk forward to much more advanced stuff like AI. Once the graphical elements are inside the engine, level designers and set dressers will actually take them and place them in the virtual world to make it look like something. For example, they will make a village out of many different pieces of houses, doors, windows, walls, add plants, lights, effects, until it looks real. Most of the elements are just the same copied and pasted in different ways. It's mostly a lot of tricks. This is a very basic explanation, it's more complex than that."
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9t7vvr | What kind of data is stored in a black box of a plane? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two flight recorders. The cockpit voice recorder is recording any sound from the microphones in the cockpit so you can hear exactly what the pilots are saying and hearing. Then there is the flight data recorder that records data from the airplanes systems such as its orientation, forces, flight control input, speed, oil pressure, etc. If the aircraft investigators are able to collect the data from the flight recorders they know what the pilots were experiencing and doing in addition to what the aircraft and environment were doing. There is a good chance that this data alone can tell investigators how the aircraft crashed and some of the reasons why."
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9t90su | How does a computer know what to do with code? Is there a code underneath the code to decipher it? And if so, how does the computer know what to do with THAT? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is layer underneath another layer underneath another. This goes on until you reach different types of electronic chips or \"logic gates\" which either output electricity or not depending on the different combination of inputs given. This is the building block of logic. Of course below that it's just capacitors transistors either holding electric charge or not.",
"The idea of \"knowing\" is going to be misleading in this context. Instead of thinking about it in terms of the computer being a smart thing that knows what to do, think of it as a physical object that works on simple rules. Like a railroad switch, for example. If the switch is set one way, the train goes that way. If the switch is set the other way, the train goes the other way. The switch doesn't \"know\" anything, it just is, and the physical properties of the switch cause the train to go a certain way. Now extrapolate that many billions of times, shrink the train down to electron size, and speed the whole thing way way up, and you have a computer.",
"Lets start with the lowest level language, called assembler. That is basically just a list of instructions, just like a recipe, only that the computer follows and must be able to follow every step. There are many commands which are sometimes really unnessesary or complex and they are slightly different for every computer and component of the computer. (Modern cpus and gpus kinda have similar commands, but at some point they’re still a little different) An assembler command (on a hypothetical 8bit computer, no one uses these but the concept stays the same) might look like this “MOVA 0000” that would, for the processor just mean go to the memory location (like a book place on a bookshelf in a library) 0000 and take that number (like taking the book) and moving it to the A register. This A register is a temporary register ( like a reading table) used to edit values. (Let’s say the book has an erasable and rewritable title, and it is a 3 digit number eg 120). There the magic of the computer happens and with other commands like “ADDR 0001” say which adds the number (the title of the book) at memory location 0001 (lets say 20) to the number in the A register (120) and then stores that to the register 0001 (now 140). There’s other commands which compare results and do more computation but that’s basically all the computer is doing nowadays mostly on multiple cores and really fast (I don’t know exact numbers but like 3000 or 30000 times a second comes close i think, maybe even more). All of this is hardwired into the computer meaning it has a big Main Street where everything happens, the BUS ;data gets pulled out of and into the bus (it’s basically just (on our very simple 8 bit computer) 8 cables that are connected with every part and either have a current or don’t: on/off or 1/0). Then there’s (among others) a part that takes a value from the bus like “0001 0000” (all off but the so-called fourth bit) and it then know what to do with it so through complex wiring it pushes the data of memory location 0000 to another temporary register, sound familiar? The MOVA command. and then there’s more but that’s basically assembler. Now as I said many computers have many own command names - what’s MOVA might be ADDR in another. So people mad new languages and dictionaries to translate the cooking recipes to another language do that you can write something in one language and then turn on the google translate of computer science, a compiler, to translate that to the specific system you need. And this google translate is just a Programm biuld in the very language it is translating to just like when you translate scentences into English. That’s basically how computers interpret code. IMPORTANT: i have some slight inaccuracies there and it’s explained pretty short very simple (as short and simple as I could think of on the go) so that’s not 100% how computers work but it’s a fairly goood analogy for computer code I think. Hope this helps, cheers"
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9ta3ob | Why do 4k videos look cleaner on a 1080p panel than 1080p videos? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes they actually do look better for several reasons: They are less compressed and have more bitrate And when displayed on a lower resolution screen it averages out the pixels to only one, so it makes the image look higher resolution because it has more “knowledge” of what’s really there",
"Video typically uses lossy compression which means, you throw away data about pixels. 100% lossless compression is possible, but it would result in massive video files. For lossy compression, you set up some target of how many bits you want to use, on average, per one second of video. To achieve good compression, this is usually set to far less than the number of bits required to describe every pixel perfectly for every frame. So basically, your compression algorithm will throw away pixel data, but in a way that's not easy to notice. For 4k video, you throw out less pixel data because for higher resolution, this data is less of a waste. Like, you wouldn't want 320p video and 1080p video to use similar amount of data to describe each second of video, right? If you have 1080 video, you expect more clarity in image, ability to better resolve and see details. The same with 4k, you expect more details. So basically, if you look closely, you can see the effects of higher bit rate. More data to better describe what color each pixel should be. The effect should be quite small, but if you can't see any difference, then probably for most purposes you could have compressed the file into way smaller size without people noticing, which for say, streaming video sites would mean totally unnecessary web traffic and bandwidth requirements.",
"Digital video uses [Chroma Subsampling]( URL_0 ) to reduce the information and make the file size smaller. So, every pixel has half as much color information as it does brightness information. When you take a 4K video and resize it to 1080p, you have 4 pixels of the 4K image reduced to one pixel of the 1080p image. You can average the color information of the 4 pixels of the 4K video to get a better result than the equivalent single pixel of a 1080p video file."
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9tanv4 | How does a computer know when one command ends? | From my understanding computers run on binary, which is just 1s and 0s. How does a computer know when one string of binary ends and the next one begins? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A computer works in groups of bits (modern ones use 64, Older ones 32 every earlier ones 16, 8 or 4) Example: let’s say we have 4 bit instructions and 1000 is the code for “add the next two values together and put them in register number at the third position” The computer sees 1000000100100101, but let’s break it down 1000 ADD 0001 = 1 0010 = 2 0101 REGISTER ... (another instruction) Would add 1 and 2 and put the result in the register 0101. The next byte would be treated as a new instruction Now of course it is more complicated than that and the instructions are different and usually don’t work lie this, but I believe this example works"
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9tay5p | Overwatch x Living Tombstone questions | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"During matches you can change characters to counter (or deal with being countered by) characters on the other team. Like with TF2, if you've ever played that."
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9td43i | Why do browsers use up so much ram? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They typically cache all / some of the resources used by the site for faster loading / going back. Also, browsers are basically an interpretation programs so they need to go through the website code and process it before showing you the result. This can on occasion take up quite a lot of memory. So part of the memory is cached images, text, etc. Another part is the interpreter engine of the browser. And yet another part is used by the engine to process the website code."
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9teez0 | How the heck did the Apollo space program successfully land man on the moon and return them safely to earth with the computer systems that they had on-board their spacecraft? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the Apollo program they could do much of their required calculations in advance. The Moon doesn't change direction, it doesn't move under its own power. Because it orbits on a regular path there is no reason the calculations for its position would need to be done on board the spacecraft. > I've also read that the astronauts used star maps? They would be useful for determining which direction they are pointed. Stars are so incredibly distant that no matter where the astronauts were the relative position of the stars would be the same. If you have a small window there are only a few directions that are going to point toward Earth, the Moon, or the Sun which are likely recognizable with the naked eye. By having star maps they could determine where their ship was pointed with the stars as reference.",
"Apollo had the *option* of using star maps of a sort, however that was one of several backups. Option 1 was the Apollo guidance computer. It used some for the time revolutionary inertial sensors connected to an equally revolutionary 70 pound computer on the ship. Together these could plot where the ship was in space, where it was going and how fast it was going. Option 2 was determining all of that on the ground using radio stations to pinpoint transmissions from the spacecraft (sort of like GPS) and then verbally telling the astronauts where they where and what they should do. In fact #1 and #2 were used at the same time so that #2 could verify that #1 was running correctly. Option 3 was the low tech solution which involved using a kind of telescope/sextant to match points on Earth to stars and measuring the angle between then; this can be used to calculate where you are. The guidance computer was even designed to be configured using this as input data if it had to be restarted or was otherwise out of alignment (they'd start a program on the computer that would ask them to point the telescope at a set of known points, they'd press a button when it was pointed there and the computer would do all the math and configure itself). However in terms of power you have to ask yourself what they actually would need it for? The main burns were all calculated on the ground and radioed up. The computer on the spacecraft itself only needed to do a small amount of math. It wasn't calculating millions of pixels in a 3D game, it was mainly calculating results on a *single* 3D vector. I do know a lot about the computer used on the Apollo program so maybe if you could be more specific about parts of the mission you don't see it handling I could explain better."
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9tejl3 | Why cant they just pull the metal pin/rod/wire striaght out of the c4 clay in bombs? | Like in movies, they always struggle to desarm the thing. Why can't they just pluck away the clay, or pull the pins out of it? Is it just a movie thing? Also, sorry if I flaired it wrong! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Reasonable bomb makers might add a component to sense the removal if the detonator and trigger it; and trigger the backup they molded into the middle of the block of clay. It fact, there is no reason to leave detonators sticking out in a real bomb, that's just a thing they do on TV to signal \"BOMB\"."
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9tfabv | How does a gyro in a phone work? Is there something spinning inside? And if so, how does it generate data for the software? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A MEMS gyroscope works similar to a small tuning fork. Tiny masses are vibrated and when the phone is rotated it produces a small Coriolis force which is measured. URL_0",
"URL_0 This video does a wonderful job explaining how accelerometers work in phones.",
"This will be a two part answer, what the gyroscopic instruments in an aircraft are and how they work, as well as how the digital instruments are and how they work. When planes first came about, they had a major downside: once they flew into a cloud, no one could see outside, and hence the pilot could lose control and crash. To solve this problem, one of the devices invented was the artificial horizon (or attitude indicator) which shows the orientation of the plane in the *pitch* and *bank* axes, or the up-and-down angle of the nose as well as the side-to-side roll of the wings. This works on the principle of gyroscopic stability. A gyro in any object that spins around really quickly, so quickly that it experiences rigidity in space. This is the what drives a gyro attitude indicator. In order for it to indicate correctly, the heavy wheel on the gyroscope is spun by the suction of a vacuum pump (usually engine-driven). The gyroscope is then attached to a horizon card, which is brown on the bottom and blue on the top, to simulate the ground and sky and usually has a few markings for different pitch and bank angles.. The case of the instrument has a miniature airplane, so the attitude of the plane can be determined by the displacement of the miniature airplane against the horizon card. & #x200B; (Reply to this post if you want to talk about the genius self-righting device that accounts for gyro precession) & #x200B; On newer planes, however, digital flight displays have become the norm. These show the same information as older \"six-pack\" instrumentation, though they can also show other things that traditional instruments can't. They are also fed very differently. They combine data from a couple of what are called \"Line Replacement Units\" or LRUs to generate the artificial horizon information, as well as the airspeed, altitude, and other things. The attitude indicator is powered by an AHRS unit (Attitude and Heading Reference System. pronounced AY-hars, ask the next pilot you have about it, they might be impressed) These are essentially just a couple of accelerometers, like the ones you have in your phone, that are very, very expensive and over-engineered. The information from the AHRS is then fed into an avionics unit and then to the screen. & #x200B; The benefits of the AHRS and Glass Cockpit are enormous. AHRS and the air data computer (which supplies things like altitude and airspeed) combined with GPS and other navigational data is incredibly precise, and requires very little maintenance, compared to traditional displays. These new technologies make airplanes ever safer and more capable. Ask me about LPV and RNP instrument approaches if you want to know more. & #x200B; TLDR: Old fashioned metal attitude indicators had a heavy spinning wheel that used the principle of rigidity in space to indicate attitude accurately, whereas modern aircraft use an Attitude and Heading Reference System consisting of accelerometers to accurately calculate position and orientation. & #x200B; EDIT: I read the word phone as plane :/ Oh well. Phones don't have spinny things. They use accelerometers that can detect gravity as well as the acceleration that you impart on the phone, and hence calculate the position. They are basically shittier versions of what's currently used in airplanes for attitude information...see now you gotta read my post ;)",
"Your phone actually has an inertial measurement unit (IMU) which has a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer (compass). The compass and accelerometer provide good measurements over time while the gyroscope gives good immediate measurements. By combining information from all these sensors, you get a better estimate of how your phone is oriented. Anyways, each sensor works differently. A good video of how one might work is found here: URL_0 These are called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). As the name suggests, they combine small electromechanical systems to provide information about the world. Others have done a better ELI5 version of how exactly these devices work so I'll leave that explanation to them. Let me know if you have any other questions!"
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9tfgmj | Why is upload/download speed different? | Isn't it just transfer of data? Why would there even be a difference between uploading/downloading? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because more people will download than upload as a general rule, more of the available bandwidth is allocated to downloading. & #x200B; Put simply, if you have 16 lanes of traffic, and most people go from A to B, you might make allocate more lanes to that direction than from B to A."
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9tfzmq | How did leaders in the past give speeches to 1000's of people without a microphone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Projection, the ability to sound loud and to make your voice carry long distances. Source: Was a tour guide.",
"They rarely spoke to crowds that large, and when they did speak to crowds that large they were in amphitheaters, theaters, churches, and lecture halls designed to naturally amplify and carry the voice of the speaker via the physical construction and architectural design of the space. If they actually had to address thousands they would address a few hundred or so in a main group and then have break off groups that either had relay speakers who repeated what they heard him say, or who had copies of the speech he was giving that they read to the group. This is the role of the \"town crier\".",
"The ancients knew more about acoustics than we probably give them credit for. There are quite a few whisper galleries from pre electric times.",
"It was easier when there weren't cell phones buzzing and going off constantly. It was just about voice projection though. People with deep powerful voices could make their voice carry further. In addition, good acoustics inside buildings help significantly, even today.",
"As others have said, projection is probably the most important part. Beyond that, the shape of the room can act to direct sound towards the crowd so it carries farther in that direction. Lastly the speaker is raised up so that more of the crowd can see the speaker's face. It's easier to tell what someone is saying if you can see their lips moving and facial expressions.",
"Everybody is also forgetting simple megaphones. (The unpowered kind, obviously, like you'll still find in use in cheer squads today)"
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9thng2 | What are classes in C++? | I just can’t seem to wrap my head around classes. I thought maybe you guys could explain To clarify my question: What are classes and how are they used in C++? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Classes are related to object-oriented programming. In particular, a class is essentially a \"blueprint\" for an object, which is a bit of code and data that acts as a small module in your program. By combining and recycling objects that communicate and work with one another, it's possible to build a very complex program piece by piece."
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9tiya3 | What does Valve's Hammer editor's func_detail and visleaves mean and what do they mean for the end-user? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"These are extensively explained on the Valve developer community site and are not important for players at all. What exactly do you want to know besides that?In short, both are used for optimization reasons, to reduce framerate drops and improve performance in the Source engine. Additional info here: [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) [ URL_3 ]( URL_3 ) & #x200B; Here's also a video explaining visleaf short and func\\_detail more detailed with an example: [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 )"
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9tjeot | Why do computers get slower over time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A few people have explained some ways computers can actually become slower. The other side of this though is that computers often only *appear* to be slower because the applications they're running become bigger. Part of this is due to natural progression of software. But a lot of it is down to software consuming a lot more processing power and memory space to do the same thing. Go back 30-40 years, programmers had to come up with a lot of clever tricks to make a program that not only worked, but worked within the much narrower confines of the available hardware. Even a very basic word processing application, you have to use a lot of tricks to make that work with a 3MHz CPU and 64KB of memory. When you have 3GHz CPU and 64GB of memory, your code doesn't have to be nearly as efficient... and in reality, a lot of programs aren't as efficient as they used to be, because they simply don't need to be. You can really see this happening with games in particular. PC games in the early 90s only a few dozen MB worth of hard drive space, and required maybe a couple MB of RAM. And yet a lot of retro style games on Steam, with the same level of graphics and sound, and similar levels of content, might take several hundred MB, or even GB of hard drive space, and require at least a GB of RAM. **EDIT:** Just to clarify one thing, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Its not like the current generation of software developers are bunch of lazy good for nothing kids or something. 30-40 years ago, making your code efficient as possible was a high priority because the hardware demanded it. Nowadays, it doesn't. Time spent trimming a bunch of fat from your code is generally better spent working to add new functionality or extending an application to new platforms. You could make your code super efficient, but it's not going to make a noticeable difference for users compared to code that is simply adequately efficient. The application having new functionality or working on a new platform is noticeable to users though.",
"There are a couple phenomena that cause computers themselves (the hardware) to slow down: 1. If the fans fail, or the computer gets clogged up with dust, the computer won't cool as well. The CPU will scale itself down to keep itself from overheating. This can affect just about everything you do on your computer. 2. Solid-state storage (e.g., SSD, MMC) can get slower through heavy use. This is less of a problem now than it was 5 or 10 years ago and probably won't affect most people too much, but can't be ignored. In addition to hardware problems, there can be software problems, especially for (sorry to single you out) Windows users. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, how much software or how much data you have installed on your computer has nothing to do with how slow it is. However, how many services you have running (not just installed, but running) makes a difference. The software ecosystem for Windows in particular makes it very easy to have a tonne of garbage/crap running. Other operating systems can be affected, too, but it seems to happen to a much greater extent for Windows users.",
"Hardware-wise, they don't. There are different reasons why they seem to slow down: 1. Operating systems, software and websites become more complex. This is an ongoing process everywhere, and with every update to a more \"modern\" look and feel or the introduction of new features, more resources are needed. Most operating systems and software claim to improve performance with every update, but that's often just not true or is canceled out by newly introduced features. 2. They get cluttered over time. When you install software (or updates) every now and then, there might be more background services running every time, and the file systems hold more files. This is why a computer seems (and actually is) faster again when you format the drive and re-install the operating system with a minimal set of software. This depends a bit on the operating system. Microsoft Windows tends to clutter itself over time (fragmenting file system, poor cleanup mechanisms) more than Macs or Linux/UNIX do. 3. It's a psychological thing. Devices around said computer get faster, the internet gets faster, and compared to that the computer seems to get slower and slower. This applies for the typical home or work computer. When you look at machines dedicated for a specific use that run a limited set of software with only occasional patches they don't get cluttered this much and don't get slower noticeably. Servers are a good example for this, they often run many years with the very same performance. There might be factors that actually slow down the computer, like aging hardware. E.g. if a hard drive has to deal with an increasing count of unusable sectors or if a CPU has to slow down because of decreasing heat management efficiency. But I'm sure that's the exception for most computers.",
"Hardware advances have increased computer speeds ~85,000x since 1980. Software \"advances\" have brought that gain down to about 1.2x.",
"Maybe this has been touched on elsewhere, but something most people don't consider and what I see the most with friends and family who claim their \"computer is getting slow\" is that aren't maintaining it properly. Here are some tips to prolong your computer that might be \"slowing down.\" * If you're not using a program and the stuff is saved, close it. Mac users, use command-Q to completely quit the app (Hold down command-tab for Mac, alt-tab for Windows) if you want to see how many programs/Windows are immediately open). * Check task manager for other programs that run without an open window. * Clean out and organize your files (especially your downloads!). * Also, make back ups of important files, two local (computer, external disk) and one remote. * Don't use antivirus on Windows, Windows Defender is perfectly suitable to handle most of the \"threats.\" I highly recommend uninstalling Nortan/McAfee if on there. * Ensure you don't have too many apps opening on start up. I usually don't have anything enable but the system essentials. * Air dust it every so often, dust can heat a computer up, causing it to throttle itself. * If you're on a HDD, switch to an SSD, it's a game changer. * If you use a desktop at home, consider hard-wiring your internet instead of relying on wifi, and if you are, make sure you're using high-quality, appropriately specced ethernet cables. * Your IT guy/Apple store employee isn't responsible for your device until you hand it to them, and if they can't fix it, a lot of problems are easily Google-able. Consider doing a little research before running to someone to fix it. Having a computer requires maintenance, just like a car, and will ultimately break down if you down take appropriate care for it. * Lastly, I just wanted to recommend for user that only use a computer for web browsing and/or light gaming to consider using Linux or ChromeOS. It's okay to use more than one operating system! I use OSX for work (software dev), Windows for gaming, and Linux (Manjaro) for web browsing and playing older/retro games. Using different operating systems make you more flexible and aware of how to use a computer, and possibly how they work. Don't be scared of trying new stuff, new operating systems can be fun and exciting, and most allow you to dual boot or even run from a flash drive. Most Linux distros have really easy guides to downloading and installing in various ways! If there's anyone curious about any of this, feel free to ask! There are also amazing subs all over Reddit for all of these kinds of issues!",
"Well a few people came very close in all these posts (closest was way more background services running), but nobody mentioned the main killer of performance in Windows PCs - The Registry. From Wikipedia: > In simple terms, the registry or Windows Registry contains information, settings, options, and other values for programs and hardware installed on all versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. For example, when a program is installed, a new subkey containing settings such as a program's location, its version, and how to start the program, are all added to the Windows Registry. The larger and more bloated the registry gets, the slower your computer is going to run. This is why on Windows you can reformat the computer and reinstall everything you had and is faster than it was prior to the reformat. Its also why I make it a point to reinstall Windows once a year.",
"More often than not, especially on older computers, it's the hard drive starting to show signs of age or perhaps starting to fail. Read and write speeds get worse and even re-installing your operating system won't make a difference. SSDs improve on the lifespan and endurance over traditional hard drives big time and now tend to outlast the rest of the computer. But my point being - if you re-install the OS from scratch and your computer is still much slower than when you bought it, chances are your hard drive is getting ready to kick the can.",
"In addition to the comments about cooling becoming less effective as dust piles up, I know that in some cases the special thermal glue that holds the heat sink to the processor can also deteriorate, which contributes to the less efficient cooling.",
"Computers don't get slow over time, but the programs they run get bigger while the computing power stays the same. If you took out a Sega Genesis today in 2018, it'll play Sonic the Hedgehog just as well as it did back in 1993. If you asked that same Sega Genesis to play Fortnite, a game developed within the last few years, it would be very slow indeed.",
"1. New software. Newer software has new features that push the boundaries of what the hardware can do. 2. Software build-up. Over time, computers tend to have more & more software installed and running. Some software starts on boot/login, some software is an add-on to other software (browser extensions, MS office add-ons, etc...) that slow down the main app. 2a. Malware or malware prevention software often slows the system, and computers tend to pick-up one or the other. 3. Hardware. Computing uses energy and generates heat. Over time fans degrade, ducts get clogged with hair & dust, thermal paste loses some conductivity. Most modern systems have temperature sensors and will throttle different systems (CPU/GPU) if the temperature gets to high in the different sensors. 4. Perception. People get used to things being quick and will not tolerate any perceived slowness. 5. Evil fruit phones. Some companies have been caught slowing down old model phones with a new operating system.",
"They don't get slower, they just get clogged. Any computer you bought is exactly as fast as the day you bought it, assuming no hardware faults and that it is clean. A computer has a limited size they can think about at once. The more they have to think about, the longer it takes for things to process.",
"So what are the odds that Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, etc... are coding operating systems that DELIBERATELY slow down old phones, computers, etc... in an effort to get consumers to buy new hardware? So not a result of sloppy code, or inefficient compilers, etc.. but really a concentrated effort to irritate customers into buying new stuff?",
"Just would like to add that your computer actually physically slows down over time. Some of the switches (transistors) start to fail after they’re used for long enough. You can think of it like they’re literally wearing out, and it can make things slower, draw more power, and potentially break your computer permanently. Don’t worry—this only starts to matter after *years/decades* of use *at 100% CPU usage*!",
"When it's apple, it's because they want you to buy a new computer. This may not be true with *all* their computers, but it is at least something they've been caught doing. When it's windows, it's because their system accounting methods leaves junk in something called 'the registry'. The registry is basically a big file that tells everything in your computer about everything in your computer, and over time it accumulates garbage that doesn't ever properly get cleaned up because it's so horrifically complicated and over-engineered, not even if you use so-called registry cleaning programs. It's the equivalent of asking a 65 year old retiree how you get to the hardware store... you'll get the right location in the end, but you'll have to suffer through several \"if you see the flaming tire mound, you've gone too far\" and \"my great-grandaughter moved away to Wisconsin, used to work in that store\" and the like. To speed it back up, the only real way is to *actually delete* everything on the hard disk(s) and to reinstall a fresh and clean system, only loading back on what you want.",
"Mostly related to software advancements. Graphics hardware hardly degrades over long periods of time. Thermal throttling of course is possibly a cause too.",
"Why does nobudy actually explain like their five anymore. Always the huge long winded explanations.",
"They don’t get slower, we ask them to do more work. Loading a modern website takes a lot more work than loading a website from 5-10 years ago.",
"Computers are like spiderwebs which everything sticks too. The more clutter you have on a spiderweb the slower/less effective it becomes. That's why it's important to keep your spiderweb clean i.e. reboot daily to clear your cache, run adware weekly, always keep programs updated, close programs your not using etc.",
"Your question has been well answered by now, but I want to add this. If you have a slow computer/phone/whatever, do a fresh OS install. Most people would be shocked how many devices start working like new when you blow away all the crapware that builds up. If that doesn't work, it could be the hard drive, clogged fans, dried out thermal paste, or some other weird problem. Still, 99% of the time you can fix a \"slow\" computer with under $50 and an hour of your time.",
"Quick and simple answer is: when you have a computer (with a hard disk drive) files move around the drive when you use them and it finds it difficult to find them as quickly as before this is where defragmenting(what a laborious task) comes in which sorts the drive in to a Better order. I think this is what you mean. If you want a consistently fast pc/laptop try investing in an SSD they are 10x faster and about 100x more reliable. I turn my pc on and it takes about 6-7 seconds to load the desktop(no password) hope this helps if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask!"
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9tjrkk | How does Apple ‘optimize’ their computers better then their competitors? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The fundamental difference is that Apple controls both hardware and software. So much like a game console that performs better than a vanilla PC with the same specifications because their developers can get every last bit of optimization out of the known hardware set. On a PC, Microsoft/Linux developers etc must be able to run on a virtually unlimited set of hardware possibilities, which means a) they have to spend more time on compatibility and less on optimization, and b) they can’t optimize as much because they have to allow for the possibility of features that are or aren’t supported in any given scenario based on hardware. Hope this helps!",
"Apple knows all the hardware the software will need to run on and can develop to best match those specs, while OSes like Android and Windows need to run on countless different manufacturers' hardware and thus needs to accommodate a much wider array of variables in terms of hardware. Also, those OSes allow manufacturers to customize their distribtions, adding additional software in return for paid placement, introducing other opportunities for bugs or other performance hampering issues."
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"Because you have the flash set to auto.. it needs to send out a initial flash to calculate how much flash it actually needs to send out for the photo to come out correctly exposed. Also.. if you have red eye reduction set it will reduce the size of the pupil to reduce red eye in the photo. Quick note.. the \"amount\" of flash it sends out is actually just how long the flash stays lit... the brightness of the flash is always the same."
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